Last we visited the aluminum hard disk platters they had been soaked, boiled, soaked some more, and boiled some more in Coca Cola Black, an excellent etching agent available at retailers near you. It was time consuming and visible changes to the platters beyond fouling during the initial tomato sauce boil and sanding were unimpressive. Here's a video of something faster:
Roasting An Aluminum Platter (1/3rd of a Gig, MP4 video)
One minute of direct heat in the butane stove's fireball is enough to turn an aluminum platter into a blackbody radiator. That a bit more than a minute of 1080p video is ~1/3 of a gigabyte suggests I've got to learn more about codecs before videoing for publication again.
The platters here show various degrees of warping. Even if it is unclear whether the Curie point has been hit or whether the Coke boil terminally etched away the magnetic oxides, the aluminum substrate of these platters has failed.
Here's something in a bucket.
Final Disposal of Materials
After their roasting, the platters seem prepared for Felipe Cardoso Municipal Landfill if the recollectors don't want to monkey over them first. The NAND, especially the flaky Samsung NAND, maybe its in the water. Maybe its been scattered on land. Maybe its been buried. I don't know that there is any potential adversary out there with the means to recover data from NAND sand, so narrowing the hypothetical adversary's search space by disclosing whether the debris was dispered over land, sea, or firework airburst at height doesn't seem responsible.
Summary of Findings
- NAND readily breaks into sand that doesn't particularly look like anything, with the exception of the vertically stacked thing wafters that break into more of a dark glitter.
- Rapid application of intense heat can make those pesky aluminum platters that don't shatter into blackbody radiators,
- Aluminum really hates direct heat when it doesn't have anything to share the heat with.
Fire works.