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Uncategorized Monday, May 14th 2012 at 11:00 am

High-Powered “Data Killer” Instantly Erases All the Incriminating Digital Evidence

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For when the police are knocking at your door and you have piles and piles of hard drives filled with stolen credit card info, CIA secrets, duck porn, or pirated movies (take your pick) there comes this amazing product from Platform of Japan. Called the Data Killer, its a line of products that instantly erases a hard drive, or 14 hard drives, or an entire freaking laptop. 

The Data Killer line of products functions like most industrial-grade data erasing devices. Because information is magnetically encoded on conventional spinning-platter hard drives, the Data Killer uses a high-powered magnet to instantly blank the disks. It also works on any form of magnetic tape storage — including audio, VHS, and DV cassettes.

And it does it all with a sickening, mechanical “thunk.”

Of course, to really destroy data you need to go above and beyond simply erasing the information. To make sure that information can’t be recovered, or partially recovered, you actually need to physically destroy the disk. but for when you absolutely must destroy all the evidence immediately, you probably can’t do better than the Data Killer.

(via DigInfo)

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  • Jack Bond

    Is Japan’s economy so good that someone thinks they can make a business off of an awkward contraption that is designed to do what you can get done with a common microwave?

  • Asreal

    Doesn’t the common microwave tend to blow up if you put metal things in it? :P

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001639710880 Louis Blackburn

    You can also do the same (although not particularly fast) simply by rewriting over a hard-drive repeatedly. Even when you “delete” data it still exists on the hard-drive somewhere, but if you write over everything then it replaces that data.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=690205924 Ben Parry

    Actaully rewriting does not work.   As proven recently by Homeland security a harddrive that was encrypted and low level formated with all 1/0′s on all tracks was recovered.   that is why these guys came up with this so that no data reconstruction can possibly happen.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Austin-Rivas/5254002 Austin Rivas

    I personally prefer a neat pile of thermite hooked up to an unused lightswitch

  • http://twitter.com/AngryTechBlog The Angry Technician

    Magnets? Nonsense. That THUNK is actually the hard drive being stabbed with a miniature Samurai sword.

  • zadzagy

     Do you have a link to this article?  Everything I’ve read recently says that modern drives, written with a single pass of 0′s renders the data unrecoverable.