>> Oh yes, destruction is good, baby! :-D
>> To me, this suggests that the magnetic domains ought to
>> be still readable with sufficiently sophisticated equipment.
> 
> Probably correct, expensive but correct: if you can get the orientation
> of the magnetic platters, you have the data.
> They are missing a journey past the curie point so far.

My inclination would be to just *shatter* the platters. You're going to 
have one hell of a job putting those back together, and I gather the 
data is spread across all the platters in parallel anyhow, so without 
all the platters (aligned!) you can't make anything useful anyway.

That way, you can visibly say the data is destroyed. With heating to the 
Curie point, there's always the possibility that brand X of drive has a 
slightly different material with a higher Curie point, or that the 
heating was uneaven, or...

(Not, of course, that any of the drives we have here contain anything to 
be worth bothering with. Hell, *we* don't really care that much about 
the data, so why anybody would bother trying to retrieve it...)

>> Also... I thought the platters were glass? Last time I checked, glass
>> doesn't bend.
> 
> Glass is one solution, other are aluminium (or ceramic).
> The video might be with an aluminium platter.

Oh, really? All the (Maxtor and IBM) ones I've tried to destroy by hand 
shattered like glass. Glass with a perculiar pewter sheen to it.

> And in fact, glass can bend.

Sure. Just only by an utterly minute amount. I'm not aware of it being 
able to undergo plastic deformation.

>> And finally, how many thousand tonnes of force does it take to bend
>> inch-thick steel? And how do you generate those kinds of forces with
>> such a tiny machine?
> 
> Hydrolic make wonders.
> Also, mechanical reduction (a small motor turning with high speed is
> reduced to a very slow movement with higher force)
> Given the slow move and weak excursion of the pushing cone, I would bet
> for a non-reversable gear-set using a worm drive setup.
> The same kind of setup which allow a small hand to put the huge tension
> on a cord of a guitar.

A guitar string is only under a few dozen Newtons of tension, not 
hundreds of millions of Newtons.

I can see only two ways to generate such massive forces:

- With an absolutely huge electric motor, consuming many MW of power.

- With a normal-sized motor, massively geared down.

The device is tiny and runs on mains power, so it cannot draw more than 
about 3 kW or so. So it's not the first option.

It also can't be the second option, because if you took any conceivable 
motor and geared it down far enough, it would move at a speed comparable 
to continental drift. This device clearly moves much faster than that.

I suppose maybe it uses compressed gas as a source of stored energy? 
That would allow titanic forces to be generated in a small amount of 
time. It might even be able to slowly repressurise itself over time when 
not crushing stuff...

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