[ale] OT: Erasing a toasted drive

[Geoffrey]

James P. Kinney III wrote:

> When I was doing my grad school work, we had numerous problems with high
> magnetic fields and hard drives. Granted, we were working with some big
> stuff (1-4 T) but we still had issues even 20 feet away where the field
> strength was down to about that of a bulk tape erasure (.01T). We would
> regularly have hard drive failures and damaged sectors even though the
> drives were in some really heavy steel cases. Monitors fared even worse.
.
.
.
> You can always hang the drive by the nearest 100kW radio station antenna
> and let the signal from that slowly heat the drive to death. You can
> also pull off the electronics and bake the thing at 400F. You can inject
> some corrosive salt solutions or an organic acid into the air vent
> opening.
> 
> My favorite is to blast it with radiation from a nuclear reactor. About
> 20us from a 200MW nuclear reactor near the surface of the rods will do
> it as well. I don't want the drive back after that, though :)

I'll bet you were a lot of fun at school...  There's bound to be at 
least one person in this world walking around with aluminum foil on 
their head because of you.

-- 
Until later, Geoffrey