back to article Hire your very own Fred the Shred

DiskShred Ltd and Secure IT Disposals have both introduced services guaranteeing storage device destruction involving lorry-borne industrial grade shredders turning up at your site, chewing up disk and tape drives and grinding them to bits. Both were at InfoSecurity 2009 with bits of hard drives in boxes to show what they can …

COMMENTS

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So...

    A lorry turns up at my site and I take out a batch of items on which there is guaranteed to be valuable data.

    Lorry operator takes each item and slips it into a slot.

    Out of another slot falls bits of ground up waste.

    How do _I_ _KNOW_ that what is falling out is actually what I put in? My disks etc contain valuable / sensitive / secret data otherwise I wouldn’t be paying for a bloke / blokess to bring their lorry round to destroy it all for me. So how do I know that this bloke / blokess hasn’t rigged their rig to provide the correct weight of scrap and hold onto my disks keeping them nice and safe for later data retrieval?

  2. FlatSpot
    Thumb Down

    WTF

    Is this a news story or an advert????

  3. AndyC
    Go

    videos...

    lots of them please

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Re: videos...

    "lots of them please"

    If you're into that sort of thing, you can get your rocks off at this little lot...

    http://www.willitblend.com/

  5. Riscyrich
    Thumb Up

    Will it blend - that is the question....

    They should get that guy from Blendtec to have a go...

    http://www.willitblend.com/

    Love the iplod blending video

  6. Nathan Barrow
    Thumb Up

    @AndyC

    http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=ssi+shredder

    You know your data is gone because you get to watch it being obliterated!

  7. Steve Foster

    @AC

    Easy - you spray paint all your crushables dayglo pink/green/orange/whatever you fancy before handing them over. If the pieces are not brightly coloured, you've been had.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    But will it blend?

    (this does sound like a bit of an advert, what is the Reg price list again?)

  9. Nipsirc

    Where's the...

    ...'report this item as spam' button?

  10. Ian Stephenson
    Coat

    Thermite

    For when you absolutely must destroy every mother****ing bit in the drive stack.

    Accept no substitutes.

    Mines the one with scorch marks.

  11. Steve Spiller

    Will it blend?

    Reminds me of the "Will it blend?" adverts from BlendTech. Except on a much bigger scale :)

  12. EnricoSuarve
    Happy

    The cheaper option..

    Alternativly for 10$ per drive this bloke will come with his blender

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qg1ckCkm8YI&feature=related

    I wonder if any of them recycle the scrap?

  13. Toby Roberts
    Go

    Civil Servant in a Blender?

    Do they offer a similar service for the numptys that leave confidential files/laptops on trains?

    Now that I would like to see, if a bit gory - although a playmobile reconstruction would at least reduce our collective stress levels.

    If not, then this is a new one for joecartoon.com along the lines of frog in a blender...

  14. Lionel Baden

    huh !?

    i just use a big screw driver and hammer ?

    how lazy are you lot ...

  15. Eddie Edwards
    Pirate

    One word

    Cordite

  16. Eddie Edwards
    Pirate

    Three words

    I meant Thermite :)

  17. Charles
    Go

    @EnricoSuarve

    Both firms are WEEE-compliant, which means they minimize the disposal of their end result and maximize their reuse, recycling, recovery, etc.

  18. Colin Millar
    Thumb Down

    Look - WEEE compliant ain't green

    Its checking a bureacrats box.

    Green = not destroying stuff that costs resources to make while it ain't busted.

    FFS get off your high horses - apart from a very few cases no-one gives a shit about your information and if its really that secret don't write it down and don't put it in a computer - remember - two people CAN keep a secret - if one of them's dead.

  19. Nigel
    Boffin

    £20 per drive ?!

    Here's the cheap but sane approach. Buy a large bench vice and a small battery-powered drill, a bucket, and (to keep the Elf and Safety mafia happy) some safety goggles. To destroy a disk drive, crush it in the vice. That alone should defeat anyone short of an intelligence agency. But if you want even greater security, before crushing, drill some holes in the disk cover. Crush, then dump it in the bucket and pour a corrosive liquid over it. Leave to soak for a few days. Coca-Cola is probably effective, and won't raise any safety flags. (Even though it kills keyboards in seconds and dissolves teeth. Safe to drink? I'll leave that for another day). A solution of ferric chloride, as used for etching printed circuit boards, is even more agressive (and pretty safe. It's murder on clothing, but splashes won't do human skin any harm. Think concentrated essence of rust).

    If anyone wants to pay me £1000 to come and destroy 50 disk drives I'm quite happy to oblige. In fact I'll do 100 for the price of 50. Fun day out here I come.

    (Anyone know the Curie temperature of modern magnetic media? Baking for an hour at gas mark 10 might also be very effective)

  20. Bill Clark

    $0.2/4 does it

    I usually stack up about 4 drives and blow a slightly off-center hole in them with my trusty Kimber. OC, what works in Colorado might not for you :)

  21. Martin Silver badge

    @Civil Servant in a Blender

    No - but they do shred the bus the key was left on.

    Security you know - can't be too careful.

  22. Frank

    @Steve Foster re. @AC

    But how do I know the operator doesn't have a stock of pre-painted, pre-shredded drives hidden in his truck, with a selector mechanism to choose the colour depending on the colour of the drives I give him to shred? Aha !

  23. Robert Moore
    Flame

    Question

    Why would I pay someone to destroy drives when it SO much fun to do it myself?

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Cruelty to animals

    And if you have a parrot that knows a bit too much and is in danger of blabbing your secrets, the machinery will make short work of it too.

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    In my experience

    an industrial grade tree chipper works every bit as good.

  26. A J Stiles
    Stop

    DBAN

    DBAN does fine, as long as the drives are still working. And it's verifiable, because the drive still works afterward. You can send it to any data recovery company you like, and none of them will get you back a single byte of your original data.

    The only reason the intelligence agencies pretend they can recover data from even one overwrite cycle is that they don't want to give away the fact that the actual techniques they use, don't involve the drive at all.

  27. D@v3
    Boffin

    Why pay someone else to do it for me?

    I've just spent the last 2 weeks (being paid) to 'decomission' a load of old laptops, including making the HDD's "secure". Once you got the buggers out, you can do the rest of the job using nothing more than a pair of pliers.

    (some goggles might have been useful, when a platter shatters, the bits go everywhere)

  28. Matt

    green...

    ive always wondered how the wwwwwweeeeeeeeeeee thingmy works... with whole computers and drives etc, you can dismantle and recover the recyclables... when you turn a mixture of materials into mulch, the process of separating the materials would be a lot harder... and as mentioned... taking a perfectly useable, working device, destroying it, procssing the remains and recycling 2% of the thing isnt really as green as just wiping and reusing it........

    is the green aspect the fact that a 3.5" hard drive reduced to dust is much easier to hide in the land fill? whilst the company 'pledges' to possibly plant a daffodil in the distant future??

  29. Jimbob
    Flame

    Destroying != Green

    How can destroying something that works be GREEN?! There is no need to physically destroy drives, DBAN will work just fine.

    Oh the PARANOIA about deleting data. Makes me sad :(

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