Tales from the field - the degausser

Until recently I had never seen nor used a degausser. Sure I'd read about them, heard folks talk about them, but never had the fun of using one or seeing one in use. The solution of choice had been to ship the drives out for shredding. With the economy being what it is we invested in a degausser that looks something like this



Like anyone else that gets a new toy we were excited to test this thing out. We had a few spare hard drives ready for destruction and wanted to see if degaussing even worked. The instructions were simple: put a drive in the tray, put the gloves on, and step on the peddle. Swirl the tray around in the provided circles for 10 seconds per side, and voila you'll have a cooked drive.

Sounded simple enough....

First we tried a 2.5" drive. BBBBBRRRRRRRRRRMMMMMMMMMMMMM...the degausser sounded off as it did its dirty work. Flip the drive over and BBBBBRRRRRRRRRRMMMMMMMMMMMMM...We pulled the drive off. Yep, it was toasty alright and it was accompanied by the the smell of hot metal. I took the drive back to my workstation after it had cooled off a bit. I wanted to see what had happened and wanted to see if the drive was still usable.

I plugged it in to my trusty writeblocker and turned on the writeblocker. The familiar whirring of the platters was quickly accompanied by a shocked "HOLY @$*%" coming out of my mouth. I could read the drive just fine. Not only was the drive intact, the filesystem was consistent and boy could I read the files. I quickly called over my teammates and we all looked at the drive contents as if we'd never seen a directory before.

Quickly I ran down the hall accompanied by another round of BBBBBRRRRRRRRRRMMMMMMMMMMMMM as the degausser chewed up another drive. This time it was a 3.5". I walked in to the room as the tray rattled around on top of the degausser. Not long after I entered the room was I walking back down the hall with two very hot hard drives in hand. I couldn't wait to see these not work.
I plugged in one drive and wouldn't you know it, I could read that one too. In disbelief I tried the other one. Yep I could read that one too. I pulled the drive from the write blocker and tried to format it. That actually did not work. Ok, so I could read the drive but could not write to it. That's reassuring but I care about someone being able to read it.

It was as if I'd been punched in the face. It was then that I recalled what the gentleman at EDR said when I was talking to him at technosecurity. He said "The problem with degaussers is that yeah sure, it's been marked as degaussed, but that's all you've got. Someone else saying they ran that drive through a degausser. What guarantee do you have that the drive is useless?"

Apparently I had no guarantee that the degausser works. If we couldn't get it to work properly, how would the people at the location actually housing this thing be able to ensure the drives were rendered useless. Promptly the vendor was contacted. They suggested we try to rotate the drive on another axis in addition to laying the drive flat. Willing to give it another try we turned the drive on its side and rotated it for the prescribed time. This time when I plugged in the drive, I could not read it. This was reassuring. Each successive time we tried a drive I was unable to read it.

This certainly reinforced the need to test all new equipment regardless of what its purpose is. It also reinforces the need to periodically verify the equipment to ensure its still working and you can trust it. Degaussing a drive is an interesting experience. I know that I for one would rather see a drive physically shredded, ground or smelted than degaussed. At least that way I can guarantee the drive is useless.

Have any degaussing stories?