How do you dispose of three Petabytes of disk?

May 12, 2016

Introduction

July of last year we had a little problem.  We had a lot of drives to dispose of and did so as inexpensively as possible via a drill press, a lot of time, and a lot of flying metal as we slowly destroyed stacks of drives one at a time.  Moving forward in time to today, we realized that our bins were once again full of drives, almost 1500 this time.  This adds up to almost three petabytes of storage in disks.  Knowing that it would take us days of drilling we sought out a faster solution, and here it is.

Meet the Problem

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Transporting it

It took two trips to take all the disks…

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Meet the Shredder and the Solution

This is an industrial shredder used to destroy smaller chunks of metal.  You might notice the dripping metal and fire from the bottom of the shredder.  Those are our hard drives.

 

The Final Results

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Conclusion

Four hours of shredding filled with noise, fury, and lots of flaming bits being flung over the floor.  What more could you ask for?

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