I have two dead Segate Barracuda 250GB HDs. One is d-e-d dead. The other is acting retardo, and probably isn’t healthy. They both are well within wwarranty according to seagate.
Any way I can whipe the drive before I send it in? Giant magnet or something? Would prefer to not have copies of my tax returns (ibkiddingporn) floating around.
I have my doubts about how well they would honor the RMA at that point.
I have one of those “lifts 100lbs” magnet in my garage. I tried it on a working 5GB drive and after putting it back in the computer it said unrecognized format. It was working fine before the magnet treatment. Probably some data could be recovered but I’m sure the file system was quite a mess.
But really, you’re probably being paranoid. Hard drive companies handle TONS of RMA’s every day and I’m sure they have procedures to properly destroy/recycle them so the data is safe. If they don’t it’s a huge lawsuit just waiting to happen.
Or maybe you can drive over to Seagate’s main receiving building, hop in the dumpster, and find 1000’s and 1000’s of hard drives in there. I doubt it.
what kind of data is on the d-e-d dead hard drive? if its dead you wont be able to wipe… so its up to you… send it to the right person, they can still revcover data…
valid points, and on that note, if you’re that concerned I’m sure you could call up tech support and probe them. Though, You’d prolly have to get to a high level tech to understand your questions.
I know when we pull old PC’s out of credit unions the PC’s get recycled but the drives get sent to some data destruction place. I find it impossible to believe that billion dollar hard drive companies don’t safeguard the data of warranty returned drives.