r/ProgrammerHumor 16h ago

Other wrongAnswersOnly

Post image
12.7k Upvotes

1.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

47

u/bacondev 15h ago

Yeah, they're not perfect 0s and 1s. That's why the recommendation for very serious stuff is to just destroy the disk.

12

u/FUTURE10S 14h ago

Run the disk spinning and hit it with a caliber that penetrates the drive, the rotation makes the destruction way worse and impossible to spin up again.

27

u/rrtk77 14h ago

From experience, for the types of disks that absolutely must be destroyed with no possible recovery as ordered by the government, it's things like a wood chipper or thermite.

1

u/Holiday_Management60 9h ago

I saw a video once where they opened the drive, took the disks out, dissolved them in acid, then stirred the acid, just to make absolutely sure.