[Turing_Machine]

A friend of mine who was a military secure comms guy back in the 80s told me that if their position was about to be overrun the procedure was:

1) Fire a twelve gauge shotgun slug into the drive (these would have been external drives).

2) Place a thermite grenade on drive, pull pin.

3) Bug out.

[tscs37]

I wouldn't bet on that being a 100% deletion. It'll probably trash most of the data but not all.

Thermite grenades aren't very good at melting a huge chunk of metal either, sure it'll go straight through a machine block but it won't melt the entire machine block.

To destroy all data on a harddrive all parts of the platter must be destroyed and heated to their Curie point.

[Turing_Machine]

A hard drive has orders of magnitude less mass than an engine block.

There's going to be nothing left of a drive but a puddle of molten metal after it's had a thermite grenade burn on it.

[tscs37]

If you check research related to this and the DEFCON talk where somebody actually put thermite into the drive, there won't be a puddle of molten metal.

You can put thermite on it once you burned the parts if you want.

[Turing_Machine]

The DEFCON guy used 15 grams of thermite. An AN-M14 TH3 incendiary grenade contains ~750 grams of thermite (technically thermate). Those are two different things. Entirely.

[Turing_Machine]

Here's what 1 kg of thermite does to a hard drive:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lnqeodIIUw

I'm comfortable that the Curie temperature has been exceeded for all of those platters. :-)

[tscs37]

Good luck getting that into a datacenter.

[Houshalter]

Terry Pratchett had all his unpublished works destroyed with an antique steam roller: http://mashable.com/2017/08/30/terry-pratchett-hard-drive-st...

Any chance that could be recovered?

[tscs37]

I would say the chance of recovering any data is bigger than 0, yes.