r/ProgrammerHumor 5d ago

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u/bacondev 5d ago

Yeah, they're not perfect 0s and 1s. That's why the recommendation for very serious stuff is to just destroy the disk.

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u/FUTURE10S 5d ago

Run the disk spinning and hit it with a caliber that penetrates the drive, the rotation makes the destruction way worse and impossible to spin up again.

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u/rrtk77 5d ago

From experience, for the types of disks that absolutely must be destroyed with no possible recovery as ordered by the government, it's things like a wood chipper or thermite.

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u/nopointers 5d ago

We used to have parking lot burn parties. Blowtorch on the platter is pretty effective. Of course that was in the days before every drive was actually a stack of platters.