So, would this be useful for killing a hard drive quickly?
Who is selling these, and why?
>So, would this be useful for killing a hard drive quickly?
No, to do that requires destroying the HD platters. Easy to do with a fire wrench or HE.
Depends. I would doubt it destroys data. Possibly if somehow it can touch the ssd drive.
So, would this be useful for killing a hard drive quickly?>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Not just the hard drive, it overcharges the circuitry, fries it.
No
Only solid state drives. . . it won't touch drives that have data stored on magnetic media, but it will destroy their electronics. Unfortunately, you can replace the electronics and still read the data.
No, not a sure kill for a hard drive. Might fry the mother oars and leave the peripherals alone. The disk would still have the magnetic patterns on it.
Are you saying Hillary’s ordered a few dozen?
No, the data would still be intact on the platters, if it's a mechanical drive with spinning discs.
It seems that this is designed to physically damage the electronics on the system board, so it's quite possible that it may not damage data on an SSD (solid state drive) either.
If you want to make the data on a hard drive unrecoverable, you need to know that there are different levels of "reliability." If you simply want to clear the data from your hard drive before selling or disposing of the computer, there are a couple of free utilities for (relatively) securely deleting all the data on your disk.
There's "Active@ KillDisk" - http://lsoft.net/killdisk.aspx - or "Disk Wipe" - http://www.diskwipe.org/.
Both of these are probably more than secure enough for personal or business needs. However it's believed that given enough time, effort, and resources, the data may be at least partially recovered (we're talking about government agencies attempting the recovery, not a "hacker.")
The only truly secure way to ensure that the data cannot be recovered is to physically destroy the disk platters of the drive. For instance, when I'd replace a hard drive that contained confidential data, after I removed the hard drive, it was handed over to a government employee who took it to an industrial metal shredder. When a hard drive has been reduced to a bunch of 1/2" shards, your data has been securely deleted.
Mark
“So, would this be useful for killing a hard drive quickly?”
The data would still be on the drive.