What can I do? (Faulty drive with sensitive data)

[SSSSD]

I recently purchased an OCZ Agility 3 60GB drive and installed my OS and moved all my files over; a lot fo these files containing private information that I can't afford to "leak".

Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to encrypt the drive and it is now broken. It has an amber light on the back and is undetected by any computer I've tried it in.

I contacted OCZ's RMA department explaing my issue and why I can't return it without first destroying the data. I was given the most robotic (Or stupid) responses I've ever seen. Now they are just ignoring me.

I read about destroying items in the presence of a witness (Like the police), but I don't know how to proceed as OCZ won't communicate with me at all.

Does anyone know what I should do?

 

[SSSSD]

OCZ aren't going to give you any kind of special treatment simply because of the value you place on the contents of the drive. Either send it back as is or suck it up and buy another drive.

I'm not looking for special treatment. I'm looking for a solution to returning a faulty drive with sensitive information. Being the massive multi-million £££ comapny that they are I would expect them to have measures in place to deal with situations like this and I'm simply looking.

I've already got a new drive, but I'm not going to sit back and do nothing.

I'm not the one in the wrong here or asking for the CEO to come to my house personally with a new drive.

 

[SSSSD]

I doubt you’re gonna get anywhere with it. Consumer grade drive, consumer company.


At work as part of our warranty with Dell/EMC on the laptops/desktops/servers/SANs we don’t have to send back faulty drives, they just give us a new one and let us keep the dud. I imagine it costs a few quid adding that to our cover, but you get what you pay for in life!

oh well

It can't be THAT important otherwise it'd already be encrypted Pay for a consumer drive you get consumer service

I finished transferring stuff at the end of the day planning to encrypt the next but bad luck got the better of me.

 

[SSSSD]

SSDs pose a problem for me (or rather my clients) as they do not degauss in the same way a magnetic disk would, and data destruction software that over writes many times can take an age to nuke a drive to specified standards



If it is that important you'll have to swallow the loss and dispose of the drive by shredding.

Another point to consider is the cost to recover said data. If the a chip on the board is faulty it would require someone of considerable skill to diagnose and repair this, which wouldn't be quick to cheap. I'd not advocate taking risks with data, especially if it's MOD level stuff... though. I'm not familiar with the actual construction of an SSD, whether the controller portion of them is on a separate board for an easy swap or not. The shred nicely though

Wow, thanks for the post. I don't feel bad for destroying the drive now. It's no where near MOD level stuff lol, but still important.

 

[SSSSD]

If it was that sensitive you should have encrypted the drive before copying it there.

You're basically equating not trusting OCZ 100% with my data to my drive needing to be encrpyted 100% of the time. Not only that but you have no idea what information is on it nor do you know the situation I was in.