I'm a confirmed pack rat. I've got stacks of old utility-bill statements dating back to the 1980s. Alongside the boxes of ancient paper records in our attic are about a half dozen old PCs. The jewel of my "collection" is an original 60-MHz Pentium PC, complete with the famous floating-point bug. Well, it was famous in 1994.
One benefit of holding onto these PC relics is not worrying about their data falling into the wrong hands. (OK, I suppose a determined thief could break into our attic and walk off with the computer antiques, but I wish them luck finding the cables and peripherals required to bring the machines back to life.)
Not everyone is so attached to their old electronic equipment as I am. You probably know that you need to completely wipe or remove the hard drives from your PCs before you donate or recycle them. How to ensure that the data on the drives will be out of the bad guys' reach is another matter.
(On a related subject, don't ever let a computer repair shop hold onto your old hard drive if they replace it. And don't believe them if they say they returned the drive to the vendor. If they give you this spiel, call the cops and demand that they return the old hard drive to you, right then, right there.)
Free data-wiping program obliterates your data
If you want to keep the drive usable but totally erased, use the free Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN), which comes in a version that runs off floppy disks and USB flash drives and another that runs off a CD or a DVD. The program's interface won't win any awards, but DBAN has a solid reputation among security experts.
Attack the platter to render a hard-disk unreadable
No matter how thorough a data-wiping program is, the only way to be certain that a hard-drive's data is unrecoverable is by rendering the drive's platters unspinnable. I've heard and read all kinds of methods people use to destroy an old drive, some of which are downright dangerous.
Put it in a fire? There are lots of toxic chemicals in that gadget. Do you really want to be breathing them or otherwise releasing them into the environment? Microwaves are handy for destroying CDs and DVDs, but you'd have to cook a hard drive for a long, long time to blister the drive's platters.
Several Web sites suggest soaking the drive in diluted hydrochloric or muriatic acid. This might work, but you run the risk of burning yourself or breathing toxic fumes. Lots of people recommend breaking out the power tools and drilling several holes through the drive. You can achieve the same effect by pounding some nails through it, or simply by whacking the heck out of it with a hammer, sledge or otherwise.
I'm normally a big fan of brute-force methods, for the vicarious thrill if for no other reason. But the goal is to make sure you can't spin the drive's platters. There's a more subtle approach that achieves this, without necessarily requiring safety goggles.
I found a great step-by-step tutorial written by David Gewirtz that describes how to disassemble a drive, remove the platters (and other components, including the drive's magnets), and sand or grind the platter surfaces, which renders them unreadable.
David's method requires the use of TORX driver bits to remove the small screws holding the drive's case in place. These can set you back about $20, but you might be able to save the money by using a large, flat-head screwdriver to pry the case off.
David also suggests degaussing the platters by placing them between neodymium magnets before grinding their surfaces, which obliterates the data they hold. This strikes me as overkill, but I guess you can't be too careful when protecting your private data. Making wind chimes out of the degaussed and sanded platters, as David's wife did, is strictly optional.
Despite industry leader Seagate's poor showing earlier this year, analysts say there's still plenty of demand for hard disk drives.
In the first quarter of 2008, HDD vendors shipped 137 million drives, which is 21 percent higher than the same quarter the year before, according to iSuppli, a market research company which keeps track of the industry. Those drives are primarily being snapped inside notebook PCs, other portable devices, desktops, and external drives.
(Credit:
Hitachi)
Things weren't looking so good when Seagate reported its earnings in April, and revenue was below what analysts were expecting. But the demand for HDDs wasn't the issue, according to iSuppli.
"Seagate's second-quarter net income did come in lower than expected, but this was not because of any decline in demand, but rather due to lower prices for its products," according to Krishna Chander, iSuppli's senior analyst for storage systems.
Vendors like Seagate can charge more for HDDs for notebooks than they can for desktops, and though desktop PCs shipments are down, notebook sales are doing very well. The PC industry got a good report last week when IDC and Gartner revealed data showing the worldwide PC industry growing at a healthy clip, despite economic uncertainty in the U.S.
What's interesting is that the report says demand for the traditional magnetic drives is still strong despite the advancement of flash-based solid-state drives. iSuppli says vendors are on track to ship 573 million drives by the end of this year, which represents 11 percent growth over last year's final tally.
Lower prices and bigger capacities are keeping HDDs competitive in the face of the increasing popularity of solid-state drives. Though NAND flash memory will also continue to get more affordable, iSuppli says traditional hard drives will stay ahead for now.
In the time of triplicates, shredders and burn cans were SOP for destroying records at embassies and military installations. Today, information stored on hard disk drives far forward on the battlefield demand other methods.
Fujitsu has come up with a way to dispose of your brigade's database of informers and cash payoffs in a hurry. The Fujitsu ME-P3M emergency degausser combines state of the art with a good ole' hand crank, allowing a drive to be wiped clean in 10 to 20 seconds--even absent electrical power, according to Jim Preasmyer, business development manager, Fujitsu Computer Products of America (click here for PDF).
(Credit:
Fujitsu Computer Products of America)
A degausser (PDF), named after researcher Carl Friedrich Gauss, generates a reverse (coercive) magnetic force to demagnetize HDDs, rendering stored data unreadable and unrecoverable "by any known technology."
The unit is a takeoff on the Fujitsu Mag EraSURE line, used by the legal, medical, and financial professions and anyone else wishing to avoid database disasters like the 2002 debacle in which 139 Veterans Administration Medical Center computers ended up in schools and on the open market, where they were later discovered to contain current VA medical records and credit card numbers.
DriveSavers, a premiere data recovery service, has certified that the Mag EraSURE renders all data on HDDs "unrecoverable by commercial means," according to Fujitsu.
So while there may be something satisfying about leaving the quintessential thermite grenade to melt its way through the server rack when the huey is holding on the roof, given the advanced state of contemporary computer forensics you may want to start cranking instead.
Dell will sell you a 128GB solid state drive for an unprecedented $649. But wait. An IDC report claims the performance gap between solid state drives and lower-cost high-performance hard disk drives is not that significant at the system level.
Solid state drive offered by Dell
(Credit: Dell Computer)Solid state drives are attracting more scrutiny as they increase in capacity and decrease in price. (Dell's $649 drive is a radical price drop since many drives with half the capacity still sell for more than $700.)
Solid state drives (SSDs) are considered to be generally more power efficient, faster, and in some respects more reliable than hard disk drives.
IDC tested 2.5-inch 7200 rpm desktop drives against SSDs and found that previous tests comparing SSDs and hard disk drives may be misleading, according to SearchStorage.com, which cited the IDC report.
"Many tests have been done comparing 4200 rpm hard drives to SSDs," said IDC analyst David Reinsel. "But 5400 rpm is now mainstream and even 7200 rpm disks are available." The IDC report says the performance gap between computers with 7200 rpm 2.5-inch drives and those with SSDs was smaller than expected because the performance of the entire system must be taken into account.
(It should be noted that 4200 rpm hard disk drives are sometimes used in comparative testing because 4200 rpm drives are offered along with SSDs in laptops such as the MacBook Air and Hewlett-Packard 2510p.)
IDC's Reinsel also said that system redesigns will be necessary in both PCs and enterprise storage systems to reap the full benefits of SSDs. One of the challenges is that SSDs generally write data more slowly than they read data.
In related news, The Tech Report also did benchmarking of SSDs and 2.5-inch hard disk drives rated at 5400 and 7200 rpm. Generally, the SSDs were faster (in some cases much faster) but not in every benchmark and not by that much in some benchmarks.
SSDs have received a lot more attention since companies like Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and Toshiba have adopted them as alternatives to hard disk drives in laptops. Lesser known is that SSDs are also being deployed by large corporations in server-related applications. Companies like Citibank and American Express peg server performance on IOPS or input/output operations per second where SSDs beat hard disk drives handily.
The IDC report follows other reviews that claim solid state drives (SSDs) are not as power efficient as manufacturers claim--though the power-efficiency testing methodology used by some review sites has been disputed by manufacturers.
IDC abstract here.
(Credit:
Crave UK)
For those who don't want to spend $1,400 on the Philips WACS7500 or splash out on one of Sony's Giga Jukes, you could try the HDD-based JB7 from market newcomer Brennan. There are no speakers, no Wi-Fi, no radio, no big colorful display, and no lush extra features. Instead, it's a compact unit with a simple purpose: to aggregate your CD collection with minimal fuss.
Technophobes may appreciate its simplicity--we'll know when we've had a play ourselves--and anyone without a computer will undoubtedly find it a convenient way to break into the jukebox market. The JB7 includes a 60-watt amplifier and the Gracenote CD database built-in, so your CD rips are automatically labeled and tagged with artist info. The whole lot can be directly hooked up to a pair of speakers. Unfortunately, it only offers an utterly pathetic 20GB version starting at 250 pounds ($495), 40GB for 300 pounds ($594), and 80GB at a horrific 320 pounds ($634).
We see a major issue here: Why max out with an 80GB hard disk for Silicon Heaven's sake? Would it really break the bank to shove in a 250GB hard disk instead? Those drives are hardly costly these days; plus, it would open the possibility to rip CDs into true lossless quality--offered by the JB7--instead of lossy MP3, which is really the only way you're going to get a massive CD collection into even the top model's space.
But the main thing we take issue with is price. You can pick up a 20GB hard disk for less than 20 pounds ($40). This is what's in Brennan's entry-level model. Hop over to a site such as Scan.co.uk and you can snag 500GB drives for about 60 pounds more. Why, then, does Brennan want 70 pounds more for just 60GB of extra space?
We'll have a full review and a hands-on report for you very soon, as our JB7 has just arrived. Safe to say we're absolutely shocked at the expense of this simple unit.
(Source: Crave UK)
(Credit:
Knuttz)
There was a time when people would collect America Online CDs for various art projects, but that got old. There was only so much you could do when working with materials of that size. Hard disks are an entirely different matter, however, as TechEBlog proves with this post on a "Hard Drive Platter Motorcycle" from some guy who obviously has far too much time on his hands. If you think this was a silly waste of time, consider this: It's more productive than setting up hard drive dominoes.
Back in April, Seagate released its first single-disc 750GB hard drive based on perpendicular recording technology. Today, Seagate's corporate communications team sent out an e-mail that confirms they're working on a 1TB 3.5-inch hard drive, also based on the same technology. There's no actual product announcement, which is, well, odd. But according to Seagate, we should see shipment of the 1TB drive in the first half of 2007.
And if you find visual aids helpful, check out Hitachi's jaw-dropping video that explains the gist of perpendicular recording. I apologize for foisting disco on you. Actually, I lied--I totally don't apologize.
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