Orient Computing BREAKS-EASY obliterates your hard drive

Kingston's self-destructing flash drive not good enough for you? The mighty Iron Drive not up to snuff (or capacious enough)? If you're personal data could place you or your loved ones into all sorts of danger (legal or otherwise), Orient Computing's got it all taken care of. While other devices have surfaced that sport a ridiculous amount of security layers, there's just nothing like completely obliterating your pertinent information moments before the CIA drops your door and apprehends you. Of course, not everyone's necessity to hastily make their 2.5- or 3.5-inch hard drives completely "useless and unreadable" stems from criminal activity, but it seems like the thrift store would be a better (albeit less exciting) destination for a doomed HDD if there was nothing to fear. Still, there's no word on price or release date just yet, but there's always the bottom of a deep river if you need an instant solution.

[markie @ Feb 24th 2007 8:32AM]

...or you could build yourself a fully-encrypted fileserver with on-the-fly encryption/decryption. Mine is humming along for almost two years now without a flaw and there's no action involved in making those drives useless to someone else except powering the machine down...

http://geektechnique.org/projectlab/83/making-an-encrypted-fileserver

And when the threat turns out to be a neighbour asking for sugar or such, in my setup I can power the machine back up and remount the encrypted drives... try that with this breaks-easy :-)

btw, to make myself clear, for me this was a proof-of-concept, but in the end it turned out to be a very workable concept and that's why I keep using it...

[Revels @ Feb 24th 2007 8:47AM]

You filthy swine.

[Mike @ Feb 24th 2007 8:49AM]

This would be great to have at my company.

We are one of only a handful or companies that make high performance chemicals for a certain industry worth billions. Our engineers and chemists need the latest and greatest desktops for atomic modeling and stat crunching, so we replace computers every two years. The chemical recipes and research are top secret, so we have to remove the old HD's and store them until a disposal company arrives to destroy them for us (no magnetic data destruction or 10X overwriting is not an option the data means that much).

If I had one of these at work I could make recyclables out of those drives myself...and I bet it is a great stress reliever!

[tim @ Feb 24th 2007 3:26PM]

I had no idea so much effort went into AstroGlide.

[Mark @ Feb 24th 2007 10:02AM]

how about blending it?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=B8H29jU8Wrs

now it seems like such an obvious solution, no?

[tcc3 @ Feb 24th 2007 11:24AM]

Yeah that river thing didnt work too well for the guy on Prison Break either

[Craig @ Feb 24th 2007 11:53AM]

I didn't bother to find out how this thing works, but if all it does is bust up the drive and platters into little pieces, then I still wouldn't consider it 100% secure. If the data on that drive is valuable enough, someone, somewhere, maybe in a top secret government lab with 36 supercomputers and electron microscopes buried under a mountain, has a way of reading the bits off the platter fragments and reconstructing the data. Maybe not now, but 15 or 20 years from now they'll make little nanobots that will swarm over the itty bitty pieces of HDD platter and read every incriminating bit that you thought was gone forever.

Yes, maybe I am paranoid.

[John Doe @ Feb 24th 2007 12:05PM]

You could spend a gazillion dollars on this... or you could buy a $5 hammer. Or have a very fat person sit on it.

[deex @ Feb 24th 2007 1:22PM]

Will it Blend?

[robothouse @ Feb 25th 2007 12:59PM]

Did you even watch the first Season of Prison Break? Michael Scofield throws his HDD in a river but they still recover it!

[tobin92 @ Feb 25th 2007 2:54PM]

Or you could use a strong magnet, smash it, then drown it in a river.....FTW?

[perror @ Feb 26th 2007 5:31PM]

Surely Thermite is the way to go. Much more fun!