Friday, December 27, 2013

Teach me how to erase an external hard drive with a dead power supply

As I blogged about before, my old external hard drive (a Western Digital Elements) has gone through two power supplies in just over two years.  I was sick of buying new power supplies for it, so I replaced it with a external hard drive that doesn't require a power supply (which I'll blog about after I've used it for a bit).

Now I'm ready to dispose of the Western Digital. 

Problem: to erase it, I'd have to connect it to a computer.  And to do that, I need a working power supply.  And I don't much fancy buying yet another power supply to use only once just to erase a drive I no longer intend to use.

Does anyone know of a way to erase an external hard drive that requires a power supply but the power supply is dead?

2 comments:

Lorraine said...

Actually (and I'm not making this up) the accepted method for destroying HD-resident data is shredding the drive in a wood chipper. There are commercial document shredding companies that from time to time, in the interests of consumer protection from crimes such as identity theft, and perhaps to score a few PR points, run document shredding fairs where people can get noncommercial amounts of documents shredded for free. In some cases in addition to the truck with the generators and shredders they will bring a wood chipper, perhaps on loan from a local tree trimming contractor. Such events are often announced on local TV news. Here is a Wired article on some of the technical issues. They mention that an alternative (but I'm guessing less reliable, i.e. more recoverable) method is "to write random data over the entire drive, several times." Perhaps your list of things they should invent should include a dedicated appliance for that purpose.

impudent strumpet said...

Awesome! I never thought of actually physically destroying it. Now I'm thinking of all kinds of fun ways to wreck a hard drive!