The Death Star incident has sparked some quite interesting discussion on TrueCrypt forum (By the way, a nice forum and a great piece of software).
After this comment i've spent some time looking though various publications on HDD structure and operation, realized how little i knew about HDDs and decided to attract some professional attention to this topic

it would be interesting to hear some technically competent comments.

Umm. personally I do not have time to go through all that. What is your question?

That kind of failure is pretty common on DeskStar drives... I've also seen a Quantum drive where platters were completely cut off by heads. how about that?

The question is if the process can be theoreticaly voluntarily initiated (can you FORCE the drive to do such a thing)?



Well, quite impressive

Do you mean the process of destruction in that way? Like I said, that is a very common thing... And there is no way anything can be recovered from such a failure.

Yes, i mean the process of destruction in that or similarly vast and irreversible way.



Not even a .jpeg header? Wow... that is very good! Very very good indeed!

Well, it is possible to recover a .jpeg header, or maybe a sequence of 5-10 characters, but you cannot get any usable data.

Hmmm... okay, and how about making HDD scrub its own platters clean, as in case with Deskstars? Do you think it might be theoreticaly possible? And how?

With deathstars all you need to do is plug it in, it will happen eventually.

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I think ST is a sub company of Lucas