Absolutely, I was just thinking about how to do it cheap and simple.

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There was an old Defcon talk about something similar, how to make a system to physically destroy hard drives using a mechanism inside a server that could be triggered automatically or remotely.

They tried a bunch of things from thermite to acids, but didn’t get anywhere really.

It made me think however…

What about injecting sand into the drives and actuating the read/write head?

I have seen photos of a hard drive crash, where the head grinded off all of the magnetic layer from the platters.

My idea was to inject sand as a grinding agent and use the read/write head as a grinder to do the same thing.

Then I realized that if you are a huge customer, you can probably have custom hard drives on order, these drives could have a dedicated physical grinding arm, designed so that once deployed it would quickly grind the magnetic layer off of the platters.

Now SSD have made these concepts mostly redundant, but still a fun thought experiment.