A discussion on HDD destruction. Inspired by IBM DeathStar

[a_lex]

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.

[Dmitry Postrigan]

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?

[a_lex]

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

I've also seen a Quantum drive where platters were completely cut off by heads. how about that?

Well, quite impressive

[Dmitry Postrigan]

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.

[a_lex]

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

And there is no way anything can be recovered from such a failure.

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

[Dmitry Postrigan]

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

[a_lex]

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?

[Shortscurcuits]

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