Re: Ways to *REALLY* erase a hard drive?

From: Mac (foo_at_bar.net)
Date: 02/11/05 

Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2005 06:35:55 GMT

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 20:58:03 +0000, Greysky wrote:

> I recently had a 80 gig Maxtor hard drive die on me. Though it was still
> under warranty (just) I decided a much better use for it was to turn it into
> a show-and-tell for the local elementary school kids. I finally managed to
> get the cover off the thing, exposing the inner platters. Someone told me a
> Torx 10 would fit those crazy screws on the cover plate - they were wrong.
> I had to drill them off. Now, I need to know a sure fire way of wiping data
> off the platters for good. The machine died before I could erase it inside
> the computer, so far I have a bunch of 'super magnets' which I dropped
> directly onto the platters and let them stay there overnight. Do you think
> this is enough? I would like to get them as deleted as I can possibly get
> them, but still be able to use the drive as a demonstration device for the
> kids. Thanks.

I don't have any practical experience with this, but IIRC, there is a
temperature above which magnetic materials become very free to realign
their magnetic polarity. This temperature is called the Curie temperature
or Curie point, I think.

So, if you heat the disk material above its Curie point in the presence
of a strong magnetic field (electro-magnet, maybe?) you should effectively
render the disk unreadable.

Good luck!

--Mac

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