Secure Torx - Drive decommission trouble
Tuesday, March 28. 2023
I'm a known owner of an angle grider:
Above pic is from my blog post about making sure my data won't be read off on a decommissioned hard drive.
One day I had an untypical burst of let's-clean-the-storage-to-make-room-for-new-stuff -energy. In storege, there were two rack-servers, which hadn't been running for many years, so it was time to let them to a greener pastures. I have an absolute policy of recycling obsoleted electronics without storage media. Drives will be a "special" treatment. See the above pic.
This is what I wanted to do, get the drive removed from the hot-swap cage. No avail!
Blocker was a screw head which looked like a T-10 Torx, but not exactly. There was an unexpected post in the middle of the head making a T-10 fit really badly:
By reading the Wikipedia page for Torx, I realized the problem. This was an infamous Security Torx! I had a faint recollection of such thing existing, but those are so rare, I'd never seen one. Quickly browsing trough my tools and bits, it seemed I didn't own anything to make the task possible.
This meant I got to go to a hardware store to get new toys:
Right tools for the job and problem was solved!
Now there is a stack of rack-server drives ready to bite the grinder disc.
