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Comment by Nux | Hacker News Reader

GPUs yes, but there'll be no HDDs making it alive, they'll get destroyed to protect whatever rubbish they had on.

Depends how it goes down, if a company goes into insolvency all security policies are off the table and random hardware can get shifted into lot bidding.

HDD can be written multiple times with random data if data centers really have to protect what their former customers wrote on them. I never looked at those details in standard contracts.

There is also encryption at rest.

> HDD can be written multiple times with random data

Which costs more in compute than simply throwing the drive in a shredder

What's the disposal method for shredded drives?

Mount Doom

Not really, if we give the HDD some resale value. There's a market for used but functional hard drives.

They have enough investor money they don't need to recoup it selling used drives. Straight to the shredder.

All the large datacenter/cloud companies do not let hard drives leave the building.

All you really need to do is write one pass of zeros on them. That will prevent anyone but a very dedicated adversary with expensive equipment from recovering any data, especially on TB scale drives.

Can still take hours per drive though, which is why a lot of people skip it.

I make a random 1MB chunk, then write that all over the drive, at overlapping offsets. I've been told that really clears it. On IDE-spinning-rust disks I trusted it, not sure if I should trust these modern SSD

Why rewrite the same 1MB chunk, instead of making new random chunks?

Redundant data at least opens the possibility that the drive could deduplicate.

Cause making new random was taking too much time.

Pretty sure most modern computers can generate random data faster than they can write to a disc.

Or encrypt it and just trash the encryption header.

When I used to do computer refurbishment, 'Boot and Nuke' was great for this. Load it up at boot, and write over the with random junk a few times.

I wrote hddrand to write random data and optionally read it back to verify integrity. https://github.com/mqudsi/hddrand

Nah, the liquidators aren't going to care about that. Those hard drives are going to be shipped out with all your wildest porn chat bot fantasies.

"Shredded onsite" means by the next user when they format the drive and write contents to it /s

I believe many enterprise drives have instant-erase functionality (presumably deleting an encryption key).

If they were encrypted to begin with, yes. Many are not.

I was under the impression that these drives may be transparently encrypted by default. (Rollable encryption key in hardware, invisible to end-user.)

A drive that supports Secure Instant Erase should be encrypting all data. When the SEI function is invoked (“nvme format -s 2”, “hdparm —-security-erase”) they key is thrown away and replaced with a new one. Similar implementations exist for NVMe, SATA, and SAS drives — regardless of whether they are HDD or SSD.

This puts a fair amount of trust and in the drive’s ability to really delete the old key.

new HDD have a SHA key built in that can be erased without zeroing out the drive. it just creates a new key and boom, free disk

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