I mean you want to destroy your computing equipment for 2 reasons.
1) Its end of life cycle. In this situation you have plenty of time to do what you want.
2) The enemy is upon you. In this situation you are very short on time.
For situation 2 I would have thought burning or blowing up the computers would be a better solution than trying to quickly unscrew the case. Find the cable. Find the hole to plug the cable in. Press the button. Move onto next hard drive / system.
For situation 1 I would have thought that destroying them another way would be just as effective. You would also have the advantage of not having self destructing hard drives in key systems which could malfunction / be exploited / triggered because someone pressed the red button to erase by mistake.
The only use case I can think of is hackers / pirates / terrorists. I could see them running a computer which has the red button ready to go and taped to the outside of the case to destroy evidence as soon as police try to kick down your front door.
"The only use case I can think of is hackers / pirates / terrorists. I could see them running a computer which has the red button ready to go and taped to the outside of the case to destroy evidence as soon as police try to kick down your front door."
I'd imagine this was the manufacturer's intention. If you're going to the trouble of building a computer with an instant self-destruct feature, you'll probably put the button somewhere accessible.
Comments
I am wondering what the use case for this is.
I mean you want to destroy your computing equipment for 2 reasons.
1) Its end of life cycle. In this situation you have plenty of time to do what you want.
2) The enemy is upon you. In this situation you are very short on time.
For situation 2 I would have thought burning or blowing up the computers would be a better solution than trying to quickly unscrew the case. Find the cable. Find the hole to plug the cable in. Press the button. Move onto next hard drive / system.
For situation 1 I would have thought that destroying them another way would be just as effective. You would also have the advantage of not having self destructing hard drives in key systems which could malfunction / be exploited / triggered because someone pressed the red button to erase by mistake.
The only use case I can think of is hackers / pirates / terrorists. I could see them running a computer which has the red button ready to go and taped to the outside of the case to destroy evidence as soon as police try to kick down your front door.
"a better solution than trying to quickly unscrew the case. Find the cable."
A dedicated panel switch.
> hackers / pirates / terrorists
Some of us have been variously labelled all three.
"The only use case I can think of is hackers / pirates / terrorists. I could see them running a computer which has the red button ready to go and taped to the outside of the case to destroy evidence as soon as police try to kick down your front door."
I'd imagine this was the manufacturer's intention. If you're going to the trouble of building a computer with an instant self-destruct feature, you'll probably put the button somewhere accessible.