In 2015, Scientific American was analyzing the potential trail of evidence left behind by the shooters in San Bernardino. The two had thrown their laptop hard drive in a local lake, allegedly trying to hide the electronic evidence of their plan. At the time, whether or not any evidence had been retrieved wasn’t known to the Scientific American writers. Nonetheless, they concluded it was a pretty poor attempt at covering their tracks. Water, after all, doesn’t destroy hardware. While the electronic reading equipment might have been unrecoverable, the hard drive itself would have been readable.
Try a hammer
The exact same thing is true if you try a hammer. Unless every block of physical data is destroyed beyond the ability of data forensics experts to piece back together, the data is still there. “A hard drive,” according to that same article, “works almost exactly like a record player. Data is stored in blocks of 1s and 0s on an aluminum, ceramic, or glass platter, which looks a lot like a CD.” If you have ever tried to piece together a broken record or listened to someone else’s attempt, you’ll understand. There will be skips. The audio quality is shot. But you can certainly recognize the song. In fact, if you ignore the small blips and warbles, the undamaged vinyl is perfectly fine.
The analogy holds true for your hard drive. If you smash your hard drive with a hammer, you won’t be able to use it in its current condition anymore. Some of the pieces might be too small to use if they can even be found. But if someone is diligent enough, they can piece enough of it back together to get the majority of your data. Even if they don’t piece together everything, a single shard is enough to put your company’s data integrity at risk.
Contact Phiston
Water isn’t enough to destroy your data. Neither is a hammer. Only a hard drive crusher specifically designed to eradicate your data is. Go to Phiston Technologies here to get one.
