Printed from www.pcpro.co.uk
Posted on August 14th, 2009 by Mike Jennings
Meet Bustadrive, a home-made hard disk destroyer
If your job involves having to destroy hard disks and make sure that their data is impossible to recover, you’ll know that it can be an expensive business: properly disposing of each hard disk can cost between £5 and £10 and, when you’re managing the IT affairs of potentially large businesses, these costs can mount up.
One IT Manager has had enough, though, and taken the matter into this own hands by creating the Bustadrive, a machine that uses a powerful “hydraulic punch” to physically deform a hard disk, rendering it virtually unreadable.
The Bustadrive is a product born out of the many frustrations of Ross Waterton, who spent “years decommissioning PCs” and handing hard disks over to destruction companies in a “readable state” but only being given a certificate to let him know that his disks had been destroyed and the data on them hadn’t been accessed – but that wasn’t enough for Waterton, who would have preferred a more water-tight solution.
Waterton built the prototype to use with his own firm’s hard disks but also lent it to friends within the industry – “who all suggested that [Waterton] manufacture and sell the unit”, especially when competing hard disk crushers were “expensive in comparison” to the Bustadrive.
Opinions were mixed when the device arrived in the PC Pro office, though – while I loved the machine and could see exactly where Waterton was coming from, other members of the team doubted that the bent platters of our pair of test disks were actually unreadable. To verify Waterton’s claims, we contacted data destruction companies to get their take on the Bustadrive.
Richard A. Tanfield-Johnson, from ITGreen Computer Recycling, said that “simply chopping the platter in half wouldn’t remove the data” and confirmed that it could be recovered – but the costs of retrieving any remaining information “would be prohibitive”. That’s because you’d need “something along the lines of an electron scanning microscope” to read the data from the remains of the platter – and those currently sell second-hand for at least £40,000.
Tanfield-Johnson also confirmed that, once you’d cracked open a hard disk to extract the platters within, recovering any data would become even more difficult, because you’d need “the same model and make of [circuit] board” to access each track of data on the disk. So, unless you’re willing to spend tens of thousands of pounds, it looks like your data is safe.
Andrew Speedie, a security controller for Secure IT Disposals Limited, concurred, and explained that there are two ways to generally recover data from hard disks – keyboard recovery and laboratory recovery.
Keyboard recovery is only effective when the disk is “mechanically undamaged” and the disk can be plugged into a PC and software can recover the data – and the Bustadrive certainly doesn’t leave disks mechanically undamaged.
Laboratory recovery, meanwhile, “requires specialist equipment” to read disk platters and sometimes has to be conducted by hand, which can take a huge amount of time “depending on the level of damage”. It’s fair to say that laboratory recovery will be beyond the scope and budgets of those looking to recover data from the average hard disk, with Speedie unable to give names of the specialist organisations who can perform such tasks.
The Bustadrive, then, looks like it’ll thwart all but the wealthiest and most determined of hard disk hackers – and, costing just £200 to buy and with a £75 hiring option being considered, it’s far cheaper than both competing products and other services that offer to shred, crush and destroy hard disks. If you destroy a decent number of disks then the Bustadrive could pay for itself within weeks.
Waterton claims that if you invest in the Bustadrive it’ll become “as essential as a screwdriver” – so, if you’d like more information on this unique product and would like to find out more, visit Bustadrive’s website.
Tags: bustadrive, crush, data, hard disk, Hardware, Security
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72 Responses to “ Meet Bustadrive, a home-made hard disk destroyer ”
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August 14th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Why not just use a log splitter, and dispose of the disc fragments separately, as I’ve done for years.
August 14th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
The data disposal issue for data center drives is one of the reasons why Seagate developed self-encrypting drives. It’s not as much fun perhaps as physically destroying each individual drive, but simply delete the key at the end of the drive’s/system’s life cycle, and the information is rendered unreadable.
August 15th, 2009 at 11:57 am
But surely there’s more fun in smashing it to eentsy-weentsy tiny pieces with a 7lb lump hammer and a cold chisel?
Or seeing how red you can get it using a blowtorch. Angle grinders can be fun too!!
August 15th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
What’s wrong with an Angle Grinder?
August 15th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
I used to work on MOD sites where classified disc drives had to be destroyed from time to time; I was told that a cutting torch was to be used. This seemed reasonable; the temperature of the flame would destroy the magnetic patterns even if the fragments could still be read by some method!
August 16th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
I find a sledgehammer is generally quite effective!
August 17th, 2009 at 8:17 am
Wouldn’t it be good if we could have one of these at every public rubbish tip!
August 17th, 2009 at 9:11 am
I think Tim has something there – a hard drive destroyer at the local rubbish tip would be great
August 17th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
The link at the end of the article, to the Bustadrive website, is missing a “http://” prefix.
ReCAPTCHA: Thomson cocooned
August 17th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
One word:
Shotgun
August 17th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
Link now fixed, thanks
August 17th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
#
# anon Says:
August 17th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
One word:
Shotgun
one more word: PULL!
August 17th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
August 17th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
Link now fixed, thanks
Well it would have been better if the link hadn’t been fixed. It’s been slashdotted.
August 17th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
We save them up until a box is full, and then line them up and knock’em down execution style. I prefer the NATO 308 round myself!
August 17th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
I take mine en masse to the local scrapyard and have them use the electromagnet at the end of the crane. Destroys the heads and the data simultaneously.
they do it for free. They think its funny to watch the drives fly up towards the magnet about 10ft above.
August 17th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
[...] Slashdot, PC Pro Discover and [...]
August 17th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Just to be pompous and buzzkilling – it’s a shame more people don’t just use a good powerful disk-wiping program and then send their redundant hard drives to the Third World rather than filling up landfill with toxic waste. I speak as a total hypocrite of course – yesterday afternoon I smashed three HDDs with a hammer rather than remount them and wipe them. But I did feel bad about it.
August 17th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Simply use a degausser (Thoroughly and correctly!) then a drill press or a handheld electric drill to destroy the drive, drilling through the platters and the circuit board.
August 17th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Check out this machine that was demonstrated last week at a hacker conference. http://www.security.nl/artikel/30648/1/HAR_Video_-_Harde_schijven_shredden.html
August 17th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
3 words. High Velocity Rifle.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8kdzkCqCks
August 17th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Thermite is more fun and less expensive
August 17th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Captcha: “605-mile nereid”
August 17th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
I use .22 for 2.5″ and .45 for 3.5″ and if the data is critical a 12ga slug works wonders
Rod
August 17th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
My preferred method:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3235/2673139572_fd082d868a_b.jpg
August 17th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
If you punch through the spindle, and leave the platters intact, the data is in fact not destroyed, only the mechanism that reads them. Any hard drive recovery place can just take the platters out and read the data. I’d use DBAN or something first, then use this thing 7 or 8 times in various places. Personally, I use a spot welder on the platters.
August 17th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Just hit the drive with a hammer and move on with your day. What a stupid invention
August 17th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
You should make a new version of this machine that also forces 2 prongs into the platters and then runs 10 amps through them. This should take care of the magnetic stuff.
August 17th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
On a modern drive, overwriting with random numbers should be good enough. Peter Gutmann who wrote a seminal paper on secure deletion for the 1996 Usenix conference has since expanded on it with the following [see http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html: “Any modern drive will most likely be a hopeless task, what with ultra-high densities and use of perpendicular recording I don’t see how MFM would even get a usable image, and then the use of EPRML will mean that even if you could magically transfer some sort of image into a file, the ability to decode that to recover the original data would be quite challenging.”
August 17th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
I work for a computer reburbishment nonprofit. Physical destruction of drives along with defective and failed units creates a major shortage of usable drives for our business. These computers go mainly to poor individuals and poor organizations. Please just use DBAN or wiper of choice as the last official act of any system (before retirement).
August 17th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
I thought that most people use random overwriting software when possible, at least I do. However, there are many situations when the hardware is busted, and the drive cannot be written to. But that does not mean the data is no longer on the drive, and that’s when these methods are useful.
August 17th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
The un-nameable folks who can recover the data are NSA types.
“Yes, they can”
August 17th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
Luiz Sudbrack – you want disk drives if you can give a service that guarantees no data on those disks will be recoverable (NSA, electron microscopes etc, etc excluded) I’m sure you would have loads if you have there trust for them to give them to you! But a hammer does take doubt out of the argument.
August 17th, 2009 at 6:51 pm
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda && dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda && dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
August 17th, 2009 at 7:14 pm
Sproggit: How old is your hardware and or kernel???
Most of use use /dev/sd* even for pata drives.
personally I’d just do cat /dev/urandom >/dev/sda or sdb (because I’d not want to kill my root fs, hang the drive to be wiped as a 2nd drive) then dd if=/dev/zero bs=512 count=64 to stop partitioning software going nuts. No need to fill the drive up with zeros again just let the os do that as it needs to. Where drives are physically faulty I just take them apart, the platters make great bird scairers, last years runner bean crop was protected by seagate platters
August 17th, 2009 at 7:14 pm
Sproggit has the right idea. Just wipe with random data using DD and call it a day. Takes 30 seconds to boot from a Linux CD to run DD.
I suppose there is a time/place for physical destruction, but most requirements for physical destruction come from the types of people who want to feel “bad-ass”, the same types of people who feel tough while wearing their Captain America underwear.
Lame is lame. DD the drive, repartition, reformat, and give it to charity.
August 17th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
I always enjoy using the foundry method, melting and casting the platters into some other useful device.
August 17th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
I find shred simpler to use than DD
shred /dev/sda
August 17th, 2009 at 10:15 pm
dd will work for Windows, too. On random days I have drives to wipe I connect them via USB or eSATA and set dd loose. The one I use supports pseudo-devices (for compatibility, I suppose) including /dev/random and /dev/zero. Works quite well.
August 17th, 2009 at 11:14 pm
[...] With 0 comments Barence writes “All businesses have sensitive data they need to destroy when they replace PCs, but disposing of hard disks properly can be an expensive business. This has led one IT manager in the UK to come up with his own, home-made solution — Bustadrive. It uses a powerful ‘hydraulic punch’ to physically deform a hard disk, rendering it virtually unreadable, and requires nothing more than a pull of the lever on the front — similar to a drinks-can crusher. PC Pro tested the Bustadrive, and also sought the opinions of data destruction companies as to whether the device was really as effective as hoped, or just a fun way to mangle a hard disk or two.” [...]
August 17th, 2009 at 11:26 pm
why not use thermite?
August 18th, 2009 at 12:17 am
I could use one of those at work!
August 18th, 2009 at 12:35 am
This doesn’t seem like the correct path of investigation to me. Surely the test is to send damaged drives to data recovery companies and see what they’ll threaten to charge or whether they’ll say no chance unless you’re in law enforcement.
In the last year I have had cause to recover a few 100GB off a USB HD due to damage from dropping. It made a horrible noise and failed to spin up despite my attempts, including trying to repair it myself.
To cut a long story short the recovery cost ~400ukp all in. Including strip, rebuild, image, recovery and a brand new 640GB usb drive to have the data on. I won’t name the company here as I don’t want to advertise but the service was amazing with constant contact and I was kept informed of the charges being added whether I wanted to continue and what was being done. All in all it took 2 weeks including postage of each way. All data was recovered.
I appreciate this isn’t the same level of damage but I’d like to know what a dedicated recovery firm would say.
August 18th, 2009 at 12:39 am
Oh, I really like the thermite idea. We should all think about placing thermite above our disk arrays in case hackers breach the DC.. Just a thought.
August 18th, 2009 at 12:46 am
[...] piringan harddisk (recover) (kalo di Indonesia kayaknya bisa deh he he he ). Untuk lengkapnya baca disini dan disini. [...]
August 18th, 2009 at 1:08 am
Overwriting the data with zeroes? with /dev/random? What happens if the drive doesn’t function–the circuits are dead but the platters are fine?
I prefer using a combination of a pickaxe to punch the platters then a 10 lb sledgehammer to curl them for good measure.
August 18th, 2009 at 5:14 am
If it’s that critical – open the drive, remove the platter(s), and the magnet. Rub the magnet all over the platter, then use your shoe to rub the platter on rough concrete till it’s destroyed. Cut the platters into a few pieces.
August 18th, 2009 at 5:41 am
open the drive remove the platters and grind it into the concrete? If you worked for a large company replacing hardware that could take weeks of non-stop HD destruction. The bustadrive serves a purpose just a very limited one.
August 18th, 2009 at 6:41 am
Nobody has mentioned Secure Erase?
Sure it’s fun to bust up some hard drives, but what a waste in a long run.
August 18th, 2009 at 8:15 am
[...] Seeks relief on Word injunction! Comcast comes swinging at the FCC! Portable Nuclear Power Station DYI HD Crusher! District 9 did you see it, should I go see it? Newspapers have no one to blame but themselves. [...]
August 18th, 2009 at 10:00 am
[...] [Za: pcpro] [...]
August 18th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
why not use a hammer?
Same job at the end of the day?
August 18th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Bustadrive + Industrial demagnetizer mounted above it = win.
http://www.magnetics.com/product.asp?ProductID=49
August 20th, 2009 at 6:51 am
[...] Seeks relief on Word injunction! Comcast comes swinging at the FCC! Portable Nuclear Power Station DYI HD Crusher! District 9 did you see it, should I go see it? Newspapers have no one to blame but themselves. [...]
August 20th, 2009 at 6:51 am
[...] Seeks relief on Word injunction! Comcast comes swinging at the FCC! Portable Nuclear Power Station DYI HD Crusher! District 9 did you see it, should I go see it? Newspapers have no one to blame but themselves. [...]
August 20th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
[...] appears that our investigation into the Bustadrive, a home-made hard disk destruction device, has unleashed the latent violence that lurks among the [...]
August 20th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
Nobody has mentioned a bucket of hydrochloric, or sulphuric acid.
Quite a few drives will die before it becomes too weak. Take the labels off and soak them overnight – outside, of course
August 20th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
I don’t think £200 is a good investment when surely an industrial office shredder with a powerful magnetic field at the entrance would do the same, if not better.
August 21st, 2009 at 7:47 pm
Many years ago at a university I saw the results after a grounds crew foreman accidentally dropped his Motorola radio in the compost shredder. Something similar would probably work for hard drives.
August 21st, 2009 at 11:17 pm
[...] fine folks over at PC Pro had reviewed a device called the “Bust A Drive“. Apparently this led to a massive firestorm of comments including may ways to destroy a [...]
August 22nd, 2009 at 4:40 am
[...] Pro’s Top 10 Hard Disk Destruction Methods It appears that our investigation into the Bustadrive, a home-made hard disk destruction device, has unleashed the latent violence that lurks within the [...]
August 22nd, 2009 at 5:01 am
My daughter invented this last winter, hydraulic punch included.
http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/dailystar/283776.php
August 23rd, 2009 at 7:11 pm
[...] Meet Bustadrive, a home-made hard disk destroyer | PC Pro blog http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/08/14/meet-bustadrive-a-home-made-hard-disk-destroyer – view page – cached If your job involves having to destroy hard disks and make sure that their data is impossible to recover, you’ll know that it can be an expensive business: — From the page [...]
August 23rd, 2009 at 10:50 pm
I hate to rain on this parade, but this tool is useless as a means of protecting data. Unless the platters are completely destroyed or rendered unreadable in another drive, the data is still retrievable. Although it would take more time, a cheaper alternative would be military grade erasure software. So there you have it. Either rewrite over all of the bits a minimum of 7 times or completely destroy the platters. Anything else is folly.
August 25th, 2009 at 10:18 am
[...] alguna vez sobre destructoras de discos duros. En PC Pro, a raiz del post que publicaron sobre una destructora de discos duros casero y todo el revuelo de comentarios que se produjo en Slashdot sobre el tema. Ahora veo a través de [...]
September 9th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
[...] Seeks relief on Word injunction! Comcast comes swinging at the FCC! Portable Nuclear Power Station DYI HD Crusher! District 9 did you see it, should I go see it? Newspapers have no one to blame but themselves. [...]
September 9th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
[...] Seeks relief on Word injunction! Comcast comes swinging at the FCC! Portable Nuclear Power Station DYI HD Crusher! District 9 did you see it, should I go see it? Newspapers have no one to blame but themselves. [...]
September 27th, 2009 at 8:49 am
I thought that most people use random overwriting software when possible, at least I do. However, there are many situations when the hardware is busted, and the drive cannot be written to. But that does not mean the data is no longer on the drive, and that’s when these methods are useful.
December 19th, 2009 at 5:20 am
That takes hard exertion and time to complete the thesis samples just about this post, thence, we choose to look for the dissertation service to receive the PhD degree.
December 30th, 2009 at 6:14 am
thank you for this article. Ive looked at the end.
January 13th, 2010 at 7:25 am
Data destruction need not be expensive, if using a degausser can be onsite and the user can test to show the data has been removed. Certified degaussers are out there and is alot quicker than software overwrites. Data Destruction
January 15th, 2010 at 12:12 pm
thanks for this infomation as i was not known to this thing that there is a stuff to destroy the hard drives too.
February 24th, 2010 at 1:10 pm
Computer Guenstiger Kaufen…
Ich finde die Berichte hier doch recht informativ und recht aufschlussreich. Wirklich Vernuenftiges dazu zu finden – hatte mir deswegen schon die Finger heiss gegoogelt – ist echt nicht einfach. BING hatte mir aber dazu diese Seite ausgeworfen und ich …