Years back we covered utilizing thermite to ruin a difficult drive. The concept is that if you melt with the platters, the data is totally unrecoverable.  There are tons of videos of people doing this, however they all have a similar format. There’s a difficult drive, with a flower pot or soda can sitting on top full of thermite. They then light this with a strip of magnesium as well as a torch.

I wished to do something a bit different. I wished to execute thermite as a self destruct system inside the device. To do this, I had to find up with a method to ignite the thermite. This stuff is extremely challenging to light. You have to get it truly really hot. The simplest method is to utilize magnesium, which itself isn’t the simplest thing to light.

What I lastly arrived at was an ignition system that utilizes design rocket igniters, gun powder, as well as magnesium to light the thermite.  The design rocket igniter can be set off from the 12v line inside your computer. However, it isn’t hot sufficient to light magnesium shavings, much less thermite. To get it to work, I needed to add some gunpowder. A little amount of gun powder would get hot sufficient to light the magnesium shavings, which in turn were hot sufficient to light the thermite. I had to be cautious though, since as well much gunpowder would cause a fast expansion, blowing the thermite all over instead of illumination it. You can really see some red thermite being blown out of the outside difficult drive as well as the laptop as the gunpowder ignites.

gun powder

model rocket igniters

magnesium shavings

Effectiveness of outside difficult drive self destruction:

I wasn’t sure about this one. There isn’t a whole great deal of area for thermite as well as the ignition system inside the box. On top of that, the only area was at the side of the difficult drive, where the walls are the thickest. I had no concept if the little amount of thermite I utilized would penetrate the drive. It did, just barely as you can see in these pictures. It looks as if it pooled in the screw holes  as well as made it inside. The platters are damaged.

burnt unit

looking down on difficult drive

you can see a hole in the drive from this angle

yuck

yep, appears to be the screw hole

platters are damaged, however not as efficient as thermite to the top

Effectiveness of laptop destruction:

I chose to totally replace the cd rom with thermite. This provided me a ton of area to put things. I was quite positive this would work. The difficult drive is in the center of this laptop, which implied I had to location it on its side for this to be effective. You can see the thermite work its method down toward the drive in the video. As you can see in the photos below, the drive cover is totally gone as well as the platters are destroyed. Success!

crusty

hard drive is center of the image

platters are clearly visible

completely fried

un covered

no data coming off that

Since this system can be powered by batteries or the interior power of your computer, it can be put inside a working gadget only to be utilized when needed. certainly it is a outrageous terminate hazard that nobody ought to bother with. It was a fun experiment though as well as I truly feel like it is something that would in shape in well in the world of [James Bond]