How to "Reformat" a Hardrive the American way
How to "Reformat" a Hardrive the American way
cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/40679506
So for Friday night, myself and my friends got rather board. And as the resident "Things collector" i got 2 Maxtor touch sense 2 external hardrives. However those who were alive in 2000's know Maxtor went bankrupt and haven't made hardrives for a very long time. One of these drive i got BRAND NEW, in box at a flea market. sadly time got to the platters first, i spent a few hours trying to reformat or partition them and all i got was write errors. I tried different utility's with no avail and decided to cut my losses, so i asked the boys what we should do with them? Immediately my friend had an idea, to bring out his 9mm and see how a hardrive would fair! We all took turns and they were pretty hard to hit (we made the mistake of drink soda before hand). We eventually landed some shots on the center of the drives and MAN it actually stopped 2 bullets!!!
going into this we all expected the disk to be unreadable after the fact, but didnt think the hardrives would stop a 9mm bullet!!
We then took the hdd's apart after are volley of bullets, and alot of the chips were damaged and all the platters were bent. But when we took off the top case, it looked so freakin cool i had to keep it
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.
Must be great stress relieve for the folks that do it as a side gig.
I am a huge fan of that hammer
It looks cool, but that is a horrible handle. You want it to be wood or plastic so it dampens vibrations as much as it can, and smooth so one hand can slide down the handle from near the head to your other hand at the end as you swing. A couple minutes breaking up concrete with that and your hands would be numb, tingly, and probably bloody. Gloves would help, but using this will always suck.
platters were bent
I thought HDD platters were supposed to be too brittle for that.
Depends on the drive. Glass or other ceramics were used at some point, but anything that is not magnetic should work. As long as it can be made completely flat and will withstand the spin speed.
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.
Poe's law comment
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.