Data elimination company Garner seeks to make disassembling HDDs easier, faster, and more exciting with its new product, the DiskMantler. By intensely shaking a hard drive, the device promises to fully separate all of the individual components that make up a spinning disk drive in 90 seconds or less.
Garner's helpful and dramatic video shows that their DiskMantler is an effortless user experience. Insert a hard drive like a VHS tape into the input slot, turn the timer for anywhere from 8 to 120 seconds (Garner estimates the process should take an average of 60 seconds, but each drive is different), and wait as your precious hard drive is violently vibrated to death. When complete, the machine will shoot your precious components out of its exit ramp and be immediately ready for its next victim, with no cooldown required.
This process completely separates the platter, coils, green board, and all other components. It aims to be both a thorough dismantling process and a more eco-friendly solution than incineration or crushing, which are the industry standards for hard drive destruction. Incinerating a hard drive requires temperatures north of 670 degrees Celsius, leaves behind toxic chemicals, and destroys the rare-earth magnets inside, which become more critical by the day, an altogether costly process. Crushing or shredding a hard drive is likewise energy-intensive and not entirely secure; malicious agents can still recover the 0s and 1s left behind on shreds or scraps of hard drives.
The novel approach of vibrating a hard drive into rubble avoids the potential ecological damage of incinerating or crushing your drives by saving the components for better recycling and reuse. The rare-earth magnets inside a hard drive are of primary interest, as government and research sources are now calling rare-earth magnets "critical materials" for a cleaner energy transition. The PC board, platters, and other components inside are similarly desirable. Garner hopes that their method of shaking a drive to bits allows for better "responsible recycling" from their customers and users.
But while this hopes to keep more e-waste off the world's shorelines, disassembling a hard drive to its base components is not a 100% secure way to clean up your data. If shredding a hard drive is not 100% data-safe, a fully intact vibrated data platter certainly will not be, either. To this end, Garner will soon offer their sister product, the DeMag, a "super degausser" tool that promises to both eliminate all data left behind on a hard drive platter and to "free" the rare-earth magnets so they don't come out of our DiskMantler a clumped-up mess. But suppose super-strong proprietary magnet solutions aren't your jam. In that case, there is always the time-intensive process of overwriting the data on your drive before subjecting it to the shake chamber, which we've previously written about here.
You'll love Garner's website for a more thorough breakdown of its fun new tool and how to get your hands on one. There is no hint of what Garner prices its DiskMantler at, but we get the suspicion that, in this case, if you have to ask, you can't afford it anyway. At the very least, you can rest assured that somewhere, someone is having the time of their life sliding drives into this silly vibrating contraption until none remain.
