Thermic destruction of Harddisk

From: How-to: Thermite hard drive destruction

With the amount of personal data stored on your computer, we all understand the importance of destroying the data that is stored on the platters of a hard drive before disposing of it. There are many ways to destroy a hard drive; software, physical disassembly, drills, hammers, magnets/electromagnets, and acid, but none are quite as outrageous and dangerous as thermite. That’s what we’re going to do here today. Follow along for pictures and videos of the results.

A couple different methods of containing the thermite above the hard drive were tried and we quickly found the best way is a clay flower pot with the drip tray for a lid. An Altoids tin was also tried, but it burned up to quickly. Molding a cement container was also attempted. Since thermite is extremely hard to ignite, sparklers that were left over from the 4th of July were used, and offered a very reliable method of ignition.

Our goal was to completely destroy the drive while it was still in the computer case. The theoretical application is to destroy the disk at a moments notice so it won’t fall into the wrong hands. After testing multiple methods, placing about 1 pound of thermite in a clay flower pot and lighting from the drain hole in the bottom yielded the best results. This could easily be placed in the 5.25″ bays above the drive.