How to Erase a Hard Drive With Heat

A well-built campfire will burn hot enough to damager your hard drive platters, making data recovery nearly impossible.

A hard drive is the computer component upon which all of your personal data is stored. When you are getting rid of a computer, it is wise to erase the drive to ensure that no one will be able to access your old data. This can be done safely with drive overwriting applications, but occasionally a person needs to fully destroy the drive to feel secure. Heat is one way to damage the drive beyond recovery, but it takes very high temperatures. The coal bed of a campfire should damage your disk sufficiently.

Things You'll Need

• Matches
• Tinder
• Kindling
• Fire wood
• Torx screw driver
• Flat-head screw driver

Instructions

Open the Drive

1. Use the Torx screw driver to remove the screws holding the hard drive together. There may be a screw hidden under a sticker. This allows the drive manufacturer to know if you've opened the drive. Pull the cover off of the hard drive to expose the platters and read/write heads.

2. Use the flat-head screw driver to back out the screw on the top of the actuator that holds the read/write heads.

3. Pull the platter assembly out. This is the part that houses all of your data. The rest of the scrap is safe to dispose of.

Roast Your Platters

1. Bundle your tinder in a small bunch. This should consist of dry and quick burning materials. Dried grass, leaves, bark or even dryer lint work well.

2. Create a kindling tepee over the bundled tinder. The kindling should consist of dried twigs and sticks. Pile them against each other using larger and larger pieces until you reach the thickness of a pencil. Maintain an opening in the tepee to allow for air flow. The fire won't burn if you smother it.

3. Use larger fire wood to build a larger tepee over the kindling. These should also be dry enough to catch well and about wrist thick or larger.

4. Use a match to light your tinder. It will flare up catching the kindling. The fire will then continue up to burn the larger pieces of wood.

5. Let the structure burn to collapse. When the flames really catch, you can just start adding more logs to keep the fire burning. Continue fueling the fire for a few hours until you have a deep red glowing coal base.

6. Use a stick to press the platters of your drive into the coal bed. Continue fueling the fire for a few more hours.

7. Let the fire burn down until all logs are fully consumed. Your platters should be glowing hot. By now the outer layers will have burned off and any aluminum may have even melted. The extreme heat should have destroyed any magnetism, making the drive unreadable.

8. Douse the area with cold water. This will prevent inadvertent flare-ups and cool the drive unevenly, doing even more damage.

9. Remove what is left of your disk platters and dispose of them. Anyone would be hard pressed to recover data from them.

Tips & Warnings

• For maximum data security, use a secure disk wiping utility before burning your drives up. Free applications like Freeraser, Eraser or especially DBAN can remove your data and overwrite it up to 35 times.

• Take a hammer to what is left of your drives for maximum destruction. Remember to wear safety glasses if you choose to do this.

• Be very careful when working with the fire. Never burn near houses or plants, especially when dry. Obtain a permit to burn from your local fire department or visit a camp site and use their fire pits.

References

• PC Doctor: Take a Peek Inside a Hard Drive
• Art of Manliness: How To Build a Campfire