Doesn't this plate of sliced hard drive look delicious? It was created in less than a minute by a refrigerator-sized machine that can slice hard drives up like bread, using 19.8 tons of pressure. Want to see it in action?
I'm reporting to you from the Dutch hacker conference Hacking At Random, where I got to watch CMGG's Christian Mesu demonstrate its portable hard drive shredder. Mesu said the device is incredibly popular with governments and corporations with classified data on their old hard drives. Just wheel this baby into your office, and it can turn hard drives into powder by cutting them into 1mm slices, or just chop them in half.
Pop the hard drive into the slot, press a button, and the device applies 19.8 tons of pressure to the drive, using specially-prepared knives that have to be changed after roughly 30 drive shreds. Anyone who has ever gotten angry at their slow and/or broken hard drive will get a visceral thrill out of looking into the guts of the machine, watching the knives slowly shave bits of the hard drive off until it becomes a pile of metal shards. The hardest part to cut is the spindle.
Mesu said he's just started breaking into the US market with these, so don't be surprised if you stumble across one in your server room over the next year or two.
Personally I expect to see one of these awesome devices in the next James Bond flick – except it will be about one quarter of the size, and Bond will smuggle it into some kind of secret location using his wheeled suitcase. Also, somebody will inevitably lose some fingers in it during an interrogation scene.
Learn more about the hard drive shredder at CMGG.