It did, just barely as you can see in these pictures. The platters are damaged. I decided to completely replace the cd rom with thermite. This gave me a ton of space to put things. I was pretty positive this would work. The hard drive is in the center of this laptop, which meant I had to place it on its side for this to be effective. You can see the thermite work its way down toward the drive in the video.
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As you can see in the pictures below, the drive cover is completely gone and the platters are destroyed. Since this system can be powered by batteries or the internal power of your computer, it can be put inside a working device only to be used when needed. Obviously it is a ridiculous fire hazard that no one should bother with. It was a fun experiment though and I really feel like it is something that would fit in well in the world of [James Bond].
I think I have just found a neat summer time project. Thanks Caleb, for the incredible dangerous inspiration. Taking the battery out before setting off thermite is like sanding the ice around some dynamite, or making sure your cyanide is free from poisonous lead and mercury compounds…. Thermite is pretty safe. And themite is very non toxic.
Thermite by Golden Publishers
If you wanted to you could happily eat some. It is extremely stable when not lit, so risk of accidents are quite low. Any fine powder can be harmful. Thermite might be more or less safe, but the fumes from burning electronics and plastics are FAR from safe. Does it take a lot of thermite to produce this reaction?
Would a smaller amount be just as destructive? Does thermite need air space to react properly? Does thermite not ignite when packed into a tight space? I have never had the luxury of space to try this out in. Maybe less if you could position it on top of the drive. I had space, so I added more for effect. Thermite can ignite when compressed, but it will expand, which would be unwanted here. I wanted it to pool on the hard drive. I may have to find somewhere to try this out. What you see going into the external hard drive is maybe 2 tablespoons worth. It still eats into the drive and damages it.
If it had been placed on the thinner top cover of the drive, it would have possibly gone all the way through. Hard drive platters are usually made of either ceramic or aluminum.
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No better, but more cool factor. When NeXT was bankrupt? He managed to get a non-painted with the flame retardant paint chassis from the company and thought it would be as easy to ignite as the proverbial magnesium strip you ignite in high school. Wed, 24 Mar 93 Simson Garfinkle burned the cube. Motorola might share a bit of the blame for the demise of the hardware end of the buisness. Only a handful of Turbo cubes and slabs were made. NeXT cases were made here in Chicago, I had some dealings with the company that did the casting for them back then,.
Not just a reporter, it was Simson Garfinkle. And who cares about the fingers of the person who has stolen your of course unencrypted top secret stuff. If positioned properly you could probably use explosives to damage the platters beyond readability without breaching the case of a laptop or metal external drive. To fully destroy the magnetic fields on a HDD you need heat, and enough to melt the metal of the platters. Otherwise the data can be recovered from the platters using a Magnetic force microscope. There is a lot of error correction built into the stored data.
At the lowest level of a modern hdd there are recoverable faults on more reads than you would expect, way more, than is displayed to you through S. I cringe thinking about the read rate through a microsope. Imagine sifting through a 3tb hard drive — Its going to be slow — i would guess the scope moves not the platter unless you get a cnc table that moves quick under the scope it has got to be painstakingly slow. Is this actually done? There are a few companies that specialize in this type of recovery and it is not cheap.
Of course this only applies to spinning rust, I wonder what you do with damaged flash storage. Think a bunch of wires going to a bare die, worst case you need to FIB some new traces etc, but it can be done, I know… got the Tee shirt. What do you think of a small shaped charge?
I apologize for the run on sentence The nature of a shaped charge should also provide for minimum collateral damage as well. Just food for thought. A shaped charge is an interesting idea, maybe in a spiral V-channel pattern. But the problem is if you look at the platters in a HDD as books, the shaped charge would be akin to ripping out pages Wherever they melted the platters the data would be gone, and any unmelted parts could still ave data recovered.
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It would make the recovery job a hell of a lot more difficult. The nice thing is that the USB stick does not need to be near the computer. I do not know if anyone has implemented the idea, but it is appealing. Well, most neodymium magnets lose their magnetic properties when they reach a temperature of degrees C. Since thermite can reach degrees C , I think the magnetic fields on the drive platters will be sufficiently scrambled to prevent recovery.
I personally do not know the composition of the spinning rust on a platter. I would assume that it is not neodymium for a lot of reasons. I do know that the platters under the magic magnetic coating are aluminum which has a melting point of So i would pick one of these temperatures as the goal and not the melting point of neodymium. This would be to know for sure that the data is gone gone gone forever. Otherwise the coating may leak out all the aluminum and leave the coating in place a bit like an empty bag with the data still on the surface.
Iron oxide will most likely be in the suggested items down below. Kevin Rose did this about 12 years ago or so — sometime after The Screensavers and before he created Digg.
He had this show called The Broken. The particulate size and shape of your aluminum plays a huge role in how it ignites and burns.
Thermite (The Secret Behind the Boom)
It all comes down to surface area for the reaction. Etch-a-sketch featuring Walter White himself. To create this substance he mixes the aluminum powder found inside etch-a-sketches with the compound iron III oxide.
The reaction of aluminum and iron III oxide is a classic example of a chemical reaction. Overall the reaction is a fairly simple single replacement reaction that occurs between the two substances with the aid of an ignition as a source of starting heat. Once intense heat is applied, the reaction can become self-sufficient.
There goes the boom! Thermite is not something to take lightly. Once the reaction gets going, intense heat, as high as degrees Celsius, is produced as well as molten iron that is formed as a by-product. Based on this, it seems that Hollywood, despite the use of many inaccurate scientific facts in other productions, actually got this one right! As a side note — thermite reactions are known to be very dangerous and in the show Walter and Jessie neglect to follow many safety procedures, which most likely would have ended badly for them.
Basically, although the use of thermite to crack a lock is not unrealistic, the procedure that they took would likely have caused at least one of them to get severely burned. Also, the ultra bright light produced by the reaction would have damaged their eyes. Finally, the reaction would likely have enveloped the whole door in flames.
Below is a link to an actual demonstration of a thermite reaction. It is very cool so check it out and enjoy! You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Thermite The reaction of aluminum and iron III oxide is a classic example of a chemical reaction. Thermite is not something to take lightly Reaction formula: