Hand-cranked hard drive erasotron — Boing Boing Gadgets

Cory Doctorow 11:17 pm Tue Jul 22, 2008

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Joel's discovered this fantastic, apocalyptic hand-cranked hard-drive erasifier:

The hard drives come out of the cage in mid-write, heads skittering across platters. Doesn't matter. Can't bother with an overwrite now. Terabytes stacked on terabytes, all into the Fujitsu ME-P3M. The big old machine that Sarah had helped carry down here. Laughing at the hand crank, screwing her face up as she pantomimed. Amazed at the grant for $35,000, but proud that she'd wrangled it. Please be dead, Sarah. Be dead and asleep.

It's harder than it looks, but it starts to turn. Ten or twenty seconds should do it. There's a sort of machine song now, the whirr of the Fujitsu's degausser, the bang of the ram, metal on metal, the small scream of the lock, giving. It's all but dark now. The flashlight illuminates only itself, fading like the data on the hard drives inside as they are elementally scoured in a magnetic gale.

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