I have a question, I threw away a hard drive but before I did, I opened it up and scratched the platters up with a screw driver. Then I went to the dumpster and threw it away in the dumpster. Is it possible for someone to go to a landfill and pick up my hard drive and recover my data off of it? I did not put the hard drive back together so the platters where exposed in the dumpster.
Safely disposing HDD
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someguynamedmatt
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- Feb 7, 2010
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Nope; no way will anyone ever get any useful data off of that hard drive. Opening the drive in the first place was enough to kill it completely to any home-PC user, as just the particles in the air alone are enough to crash the head on any modern HDD. The tolerances are that sensitive. It's been effectively destroyed.
Thanks for the quick reply, but it isn't very modern... It's from maybe 2003-2005. Does that effect anything?
Also what do you think the odds are of someone searching landfills during the winter? I'm in the USA btw and sorry but I'm a little paranoid.
And does scratching the platters do anything?
someguynamedmatt
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When I say 'modern', I'm thinking anything that isn't older than the early 1990s, and those drives could barely keep themselves running in the first place. Back in the days of MFM Hard Drives (huge, loud things that cost mass amounts of money), the head-platter clearance was a lot wider, and the drives themselves worked in a fundamentally different way. Don't worry yourself with it. 
http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/research/hints-or-tips/detail.page?&LegacyDocID=MIGR-4CVJQG
Even touching the platter at all would destroy it, ontop of already being inoperable from opening the drive in the first place. The clearance between the read/write head and the disk itself is so, so small that anything that comes in contact with the platter will probably render it permanently inoperable. Hard Drives are very sensitive pieces of equipment. You can see from the second picture from above what happens when just the microscopic little r/w head touches the platter - just imagine what your screwdriver did to it. That drive is now far beyond repair by the means of anyone who could possibly find it.
http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/research/hints-or-tips/detail.page?&LegacyDocID=MIGR-4CVJQG
Even touching the platter at all would destroy it, ontop of already being inoperable from opening the drive in the first place. The clearance between the read/write head and the disk itself is so, so small that anything that comes in contact with the platter will probably render it permanently inoperable. Hard Drives are very sensitive pieces of equipment. You can see from the second picture from above what happens when just the microscopic little r/w head touches the platter - just imagine what your screwdriver did to it. That drive is now far beyond repair by the means of anyone who could possibly find it.
manofchalk
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Scratching up the platters pretty much ensures that no one could ever read from that disk again. To my knowledge, data is written in rings around the centre of the platter, so any scratch going from centre to end would kill just about everything on it. Thats assuming the drive is perfectly unfragmented and only has one platter, chances are little bits of the data are scattered everywhere on and throughout the platters, its well and truly unreadable if you scratched it up.
Opening the drive also messed it up, as long as whoever is putting it back together doesn't have the exact tools to do it. You need to put the correct toque on every screw in the thing to make sure everything is where it needs to go. Dont think air particles would kill it though, platter transplants (the drive is dead in some way but platters are intact and can be moved to a different drive) dont need to take place in clean rooms, despite the minuscule fault tolerances in a drive.
The best method is just to use a hammer, there is no way you can recover data from a shattered disk.
Opening the drive also messed it up, as long as whoever is putting it back together doesn't have the exact tools to do it. You need to put the correct toque on every screw in the thing to make sure everything is where it needs to go. Dont think air particles would kill it though, platter transplants (the drive is dead in some way but platters are intact and can be moved to a different drive) dont need to take place in clean rooms, despite the minuscule fault tolerances in a drive.
The best method is just to use a hammer, there is no way you can recover data from a shattered disk.
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