Many years ago when we finally sunset out first generation servers, we took them out to a gun range and let the support department have the first shots.
The amount of stress relief the support department felt blowing holes in those servers.
"THATS WHAT YOU GET FOR BREAKING DNS FOR THE LAST TIME!!!!"
Those old school drives were built like tanks.
I still have a few ~100MB drives in my things and you can feel the difference in quality compared to today.
I always wondered what would happen if you shot them lol. Thanks for satisfying an age old curiosity.
I have a 250MB in aluminum container HD from 2005ish. Still works AFAIK.
Might be fun to stress test it, but I expect the discs inside would shatter from shocks before the case ever showed signs of wear.
There's an old school program called spinrite that is designed to stress test them and gives you a little report at the end.
My preferred method, just one hit:
This is also the officially supported US Government way. Not lying. I worked for a VAR with NASA and DHS contracts. Bad hard drives were bashed with a sledge like this before the top plate was sent to the manufacturer for RMA.
Don't drink "soda" and shoot guns, you should damn well know better.
(Small amounts of) alcohol is considered a PED in professional shooting. It steadies the hand.
platters were bent
I thought HDD platters were supposed to be too brittle for that.
To this day, Maxtor was the only drive that took a complete dump on me... because of that, I have always had bias towards that brand. This is over 30 years of using computers and as someone who worked tech support for a company of 5 thousand people. This failure happened at my job, and that person was not very happy.
It’s honestly easier to just disassemble them and then hack the platters up, if you’re really that paranoid. Or just melt it down with an inductive heater.
But its not as fun :D
Says someone who’s never melted a hard drive :D
How does one even do that? Like a forge or map gas? I will admit it sounds fun!
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