We have a new policy at UNI that requires all hard drives that are no longer in use by the university to be securely wiped of data or in some cases completely destroyed. How do you destroy a hard drive? Well, one way is to us a big degausser to zap the read/write heads and all the data on the platters, rendering the drive intact, but unusable. And how do you break a degausser? Have a student shove a drive into it with the mounting screws still attached!

Yes, that's exactly what happened to our aptly named "Data Eliminator" this morning. I went into the server room to feed an install disc to a server I'm rebuilding and I saw my friend Eric taking the degausser apart. Seeing as how I always enjoy tearing gear apart and I've never seen the inside of one of these units, I offered to help. Eventually, we ended up having to take most of the case apart to get to the bit that was blocking the drive from being removed. Many many screws later we got the offending drive out and even got the unit put back together in working order! If only I was wearing my I Void Warranties t-shirt today!