[djaychela]

I'm constantly amazed at the waste that happens when people decide they are going to destroy an old (serviceable) hard drive because they want to protect their old data on it.

I don't see a need in 99% of cases, when there are perfectly good ways to permanently delete the data and make it unrecoverable, albeit taking a longer time. No doubt I'll get shot to bits for this with various edge cases where it's important that the data is not recoverable, but the environmental cost of people destroying perfectly good drives because they want to upgrade and think that drilling or thermite is the way forward needs to be taken into account. Yes, it's quick to do the drilling, but is it really necessary when a free piece of software will render the same drive usable but without any real chance of access to the data that's on there?

We live in an increasingly throwaway society, but I'm certain that we will be viewed with true disgust by future generations when they see how knowingly profligate we have been with the resources we had access to.

[raverbashing]

I agree

Unless you're dealing with top-secret material, losing the encryption key is the best way

Or just dd around 5x - 50x (or more if you're paranoid) its size to the disk - if you want to further reuse it. No, you won't have a meaningful amount of data remaining on the disk and extracting it requires special software/hardware. Unless you're dealing with data that makes the disk price irrelevant, you can follow this procedure.

But if you're in the mood for vulgar displays of power, microwave the board or use a Tesla coil

[3pt14159]

A bitcoin wallet is not top-secret material and I don't trust myself not to fuck up overwriting the entire disk. I'd rather just take an angle grinder to it and not worry about it.

[hvidgaard]

Or just transfer all the btc to a new wallet. It's something you should be ready to do anyway, if your wallet is assumed compromised at any point.

[StavrosK]

If your Bitcoin wallet is on your hard drive, recovery after overwrite is the least of your worries.

[andai]

Where is yours? Hardcopy?

[StavrosK]

For the everyday coins (which I never use), my phone. For the savings (which I don't have), hardware wallet. The Ledger Nano S is great, I have one, but the HW1 is also very good and very very cheap.

[raverbashing]

If your btc wallet is left unencrypted in your hard drive, either spinning or ssd, you have bigger problems than someone rummaging for your used hardware

[3pt14159]

To be fair, this is on a computer I haven't turned on in years, before hardware wallets were a thing.

[raverbashing]

Ah just sledgehammer the drive then

[devoply]

dd 1x-2x is enough in most use cases. most people don't have the time to go rummaging through random hard drive to recover what is mostly garbage. there might be a gem in there, but it's a straw in a haystack.

[falcolas]

People have stranger hobbies. I can certainly see the appeal of buying used hard drives just to see what you can recover; part technical challenge, part voyeurism, and part schadenfreude.

[michaelt]

Back in ~2008 someone ran what they called "the great zero challenge" promising a prize to anyone who could recover data from a (60GB mechanical) hard drive after dd had overwritten the drive with zeros once.

The prize wasn't large, but the challenge got pretty good coverage on tech news sites, so it would have been good PR for any data recovery company.

Nobody accepted the challenge. I think recovering such data is impossible, and I'd be fascinated to be proven wrong - if you know anyone who could do so?

[gens]

Apparently the NSA would. (somewhere around the shredding part; don't have time to find exact)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bpX8YvNg6Y&feature=youtu.be

[DanBC]

Disc drives are consumable items. They only last 5 years. They're so fragile we treat them as if they're going to fail at any time - we have multiple backups in many places.

We shouldn't be encouraging people to use them for as long as possible, we should be encouraging better recycling.

I agree about other electronics though - the constant upgrade cycle is very damaging to the environment.

[Gracana]

If your uptime doesn't matter and you keep good backups, I don't see why you shouldn't run it 'til it won't, and then recycle it. All my shit's more than 5 years old. Some of it is nearing 20. I guess there's an argument to me made about saving power with newer technology, but I don't want to spend the money to upgrade and I'm not sure which recycling companies recycle properly vs shipping everything out to be stripped down by children with hammers and coal fires.