Question: Destroying a Hard Drive

madoctopus said:

Depends whom you're trying to hide from. Also in US and some other countries having an encypted HDD won't fly in court as they can demand the password and if you don't provide it they assume you're guilty. Also while cracking a strong password isn't possible for most, somebody with high resources like NSA might be able to bruteforce using a supercomputer. Like 7 years ago or so they were able to bruteforce SSL128 in 2 seconds flat. That, assuming they don't already have a solution for easier cracking.

That aside, if somebody beats the shit out of you, tortures you or somebody dear to you, you will tell them the password yourself. So, I guess sometimes actually destroying something is the way to go. for most cases and most people, yeah encryption is great.

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wow wait..what? If in some case's you don't provide the password, you're guilty ?! :O Damn US Americans
In Germany this is definitely not the case.

Regarding encryption, if you use AES 256Bit with let's say a 20 words password, it would really take maybe 100 hundred year's to crack it, if we assume that till then we are going to have quantum computers.

The last point has nothing to do against if that really happens But you must have done some really bad stuff for that to happen.

By the way regarding the topic, I read one guy who had made a very nice solution:
Basically he had a big magnet somehow put inside his PC but not directly attached to the hard-drive. Then he had a button & in the worst case, he would just put the button to release the magnet & destroy the hard drive. That's a really gentle-like solution!

step on it is the easies ay