By Gemma Simpson, 15 June 2007 13:31
From mouldy bananas to smelly socks to falling out of a helicopter, there are many different ways to wreck a computer hard drive.
Data recovery company Ontrack challenged silicon.com to 'do our worst' to two innocent drives and send them off to be resurrected in the company labs.
In this video see how two silicon.com team members - editor-at-large Will Sturgeon and reporter Gemma Simpson - fared in the data destruction challenge and if that all-important data could be raised from the dead.
Comments
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1. anonymous
The data was able to be recovered becasue the platters were not damaged. Dropping a drive from a building or soaking it in beer doesn't effect the internal platters in a way that makes data recovery impossible. The perpetuation of this misinformation makes IT professionals nervous about truly reliable data destruction techniques since the data recovery industry routinely promotes this kind of misinformation. Drill a hole in the platter and THEN recover data...THAT would impress me.
2. RObert Shuttleworth
The abused drives did not appear to be from laptops, however the Ontrack people were fixing laptop hard drives.