Too many tapes, Too much TTL, I want my garage back

From: jim stephens <jwstephens_at_msm.umr.edu>
Date: Mon Feb 7 01:32:41 2005

Philip,
A way to absolutely do it other than bandsaw is to put them in solvent. burning
may
produce bad organics in the case of the plastics involved, so something like
brake fluid or carbeurator cleaner solution in a drum for a few months would
do away with it (and create a toxic waste item) but no data.

However this is not necessary.

For any magnetic media which can be degaused, the easy way to destroy
the data is to use a very high strength magnet field. rig a magnet circuit by
using two rare earth magnets looped by a soft steel u or whatever (must
be very susciptible magnetic alloy) and make a gap which holds apart
the two rare earth magnets. The soft alloy loop is necessary as you
have to create a "circuit" but you only need the power on both sides
of your tape reels. when you pass the tapes thru that gap all the
domains will be aligned, therefore "erasing" the tape. The whole
spool of the tape must be put in that gap, and idealy rotated for
each reel in a cartidge.

This only takes a few seconds per tape and is utterly unrecoverable.

We degaused several thousand 1/2" tapes and floppies using these, and
in the case of the floppys I never found one that did not need reformatting
in years of using them.

If you have been so unfortunate as to have dismantled a disk drive with
a large "voice coil" size positioner magnet in it, you can ususally open the
magnet of the positioner up and find a gap that will work.

I hesitate to mention this too much as I would never want to see
someone break up a drive just to do this. I have several which were
acquired when they came from defective drives, and not from running
or old ones.

Do not use this method on such as the HP quarter inch cartride preformatted
tapes, it will destroy them, and render them only useful in such as archive or
cipher drives. They have to be preformatted with a clock track, in the ususal
"unfriendly HP you can only buy these from us" way. how to make a $10
cartridge into a $50 cartridge with no added value. but that is another
complaint.

Hope this helps.
Jim

Philip Freidin wrote:<snip>

>
> a) Is there any absolutely certain way to erase these tapes
> (a super bulk eraser) other than running them all through
> a tape drive and over writing everything, or running them
> through a band saw.
> <snip>
> Thanks for any interest,
> Philip Freidin
>
> =================
> Philip Freidin
> philip_at_fliptronics.com
Received on Mon Feb 07 2005 - 01:32:41 GMT