Acquiring Hard Drives

Offer to drill them right in front of them. Or take them apart. Portable drill and a few security bits will get you into just about any hard drive. Pull the controller board and then open it up. Pull the platters and either break them or otherwise in front of the customer.



The other option is to invest in a degausser (it's not cheap) that will basically destroy ANY data on a hard drive using an extremely powerful magnet.

The fancy letters you want to use...you have to go through a compliance process, take some classes and pay a bunch of money to get the certifications.

I just say, look at the amount of effort you want to put in vs the amount of drive you can get your hands on. Again, I look at resale only, since that is where the $$$ are ($10-100 per drive) vs a few bucks in scrap. IE I need to have access to a boatload of drives if I buy a $2K degausser....and if I am doing that, I would want some commercial accounts that I can CHARGE them to destroy the drive...most companies do that specialize in that sort of thing...granted many of those have a $5-8K hard drive shredder.

Good luck!

Originally Posted by logansryche

Would a VHS eraser work? I've got one of those floating around the house.

No...not even KINDA...a degausser is several 1000x the power of that at least...the wands come with their own case to shield it where you don't accidentally erase say your credit cards. They make them where you put the drive in can close the case as well..then the degaussing charge is applied.

Hard Drive degaussers are specialized equipment and would be far more powerful that anything you might find lying around.

Hard drive logic boards run about $10/lb (might be a bit less lately), then you have stainless steel and alluminum for the casing and the platters contain a VERY small amount of platinum. There is also a bit of gold on the end of the hard drive reader. IE they are not all that special as far as ewaste goes...UNLESS you are professionally wiping them and reselling....then they are basically free or a small amount of $$ and worth $20-100...and SSD/laptop drives sometimes more. You can actually make more money taking telecom equipment at $3-8/lb for the boards and you also can pull tantlum and other things off those.

Either way, unless you are specializing and LEARN how to wipe and resell...or offer that professional service along with a COD (certificate of destruction) (professional software will give this ability to you) where you CHARGE to do each drive, don't lose too much sleep over it. Yes it is $$$, but not all that much unless charging to wipe or reselling....take the time an LEARN in the forum here (search hard drive wiping for instance), take the other stuff and expand your business as you get more educated on the subject.

I have been doing things with computers since the early 90's. All of the procedures I mentioned above are not THAT hard, but it does take some technical expertise and/or a few $$ to learn to do....and ALOT of $$ if you are going the easy degausser method...but then the drive is TOTALLY unusable and not reparable.