IT worker tried to destroy an SSD with a drill and failed spectacularly

[wiyosaya]

Any "good" IT person knows that the best tools are not trustworthy enough. Those who might want your data to the point you have to destroy it have the resources to recover data from devices that have been wiped.

Thats why destructive methods are implemented. Grinding the disks or NAND into dust makes recovery impossible no matter how driven ne may be.

I guess you didn't' read the instructions. Secure erase, these days, consists of changing the drive's internal encryption key. Its an instruction in modern drive firmware SSD or physical. Whether or not that can be cracked is debatable since it's considered secure erase at the highest level by CERT.

And besides, that, its easy enough to overwrite the entire drive with a random pattern or 0s, No IT person can recover the previous contents of a drive that has had both its encryption key changed, and the drive has then been overwritten in its entirety. The encryption mechanism is part of the internal components of the drive.

but knock yourself out, if you'd like, trying to recover data from a drive erased in that manner.

 

[ATXFerret]

I haven't had to dispose of any drive in a very long time.

When I worked for local ISP back in the day, early 00s, I would write it to zeroes, put a two bolts through it, and then we'd put it in a big metal bucket we had for some reason and set it on fire with junk mail.

I guess with SSDs I would secure erase, write to zeroes, and put a bolt through each chip, passing through to the other side on double sided drives.

Maybe I should go ahead and buy some right sized bolts to have around.

 

[ZedRM]

I was talking about SSDs specifically and I would like to see a test on this. I'm not talking about causing physical damage per say, just that shorting out the traces with the ultra high voltage caused by the microwave would damage the chips. Nothing like a gental 10,000 volt shock

While what you're saying is, in theory, plausible, in reality it doesn't work that way. Physical destruction of the NAND chips is the best method of ensuring the data is unrecoverable.