"We drive a stake through it."
My 320 GB LaCie external hard drive, which served me faithfully for five years, failed to mount last week. This could have been because it accidentally fell on my hardwood floor, although I’m not ruling out an act of suicide over being upstaged by my new 1TB LaCie hard drive.
I brought it to Tekserve to find out if there was anything that could be done. Diagnosis: Sorry, it’s trashed.
“So do I bring it somewhere to be recycled or something?”
“Actually, we can dispose of it for you right here.”
“How do I make sure that nobody can retrieve what’s on the hard drive?”
“We take the drive out of the case and put a stake through it.” And he wasn’t kidding; it’s actually what they do. And then they sell the case as scrap.
The tech brought me a release to sign. I felt like I was putting an old sick pet to sleep. Fortunately, I had backed up all the info on the drive just before it (literally) crashed, or there would have been a data recovery fee of up to $800.
I’m treating the new one with kid gloves now, continuing to back up regularly, managing the octopus of cables so it doesn’t accidentally get dragged off the desk, and being on the lookout for hard drive suicide notes.
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