Planning to RMA Your Hard Drive? Make Sure Your Data is Safe

When major floods struck Thailand last fall, hard drive manufacturers found themselves in a bad position. Certain parts became rare out of nowhere, and as a result, hard drive prices sky-rocketed. Post-flood, prices for a given model saw a hike of up to 3x, so it’s of little surprise that some have looked at alternative solutions to picking up a drive, such as going with a refurbished model. But what happens when you get a little more than you expected? Such as data already on the drive?

That’s what happened to one Slashdot user, who purchased three hard drives from Newegg. All three had some sort of existing partition, but as a whole that’s not such a big deal. After all, if a company such as Western Digital refurbs a drive, there’s little doubt it might run tools on it to make sure it performs as it should. But here’s a caveat: one of the drives had a full OS install on it, with nothing deleted. Best of all? It was a hard drive used for business.

I am not sure if companies like WD and Seagate actually do refurbish their own drives, but this sort of problem is inexcusable. While one hard drive might not have important information, another might. Imagine receiving a drive that has someone’s credit card numbers, passwords built into the browser, and so forth? You could cause a lot more damage than a drive failure could.

This can put those who need RMAs in a bad position. If a drive reaches the point where the motor or some other integral hardware breaks, then the user has no control over deleting the data properly first. It’d be nice to expect that the refurbishing company would take care of that for you, but as this proves, they might not. On a hard drive with truly sensitive information on it, you have one realistic option: destroy it. Take magnets to it, or thermite to make it interesting, but anything to make sure that the data is not going to be recoverable. It’s not a great option, but it’s the best one.

Kudos to the guys over at TechSnap for cluing me into this story, as I somehow overlooked it in my RSS feed.