Bullets vs. hard drives

Did you ever wonder what would happen when a bullet passes through different things? I have always enjoyed shooting a random pumpkin or a tv. Just fyi…a pumpkin makes an excellent display when shot with a proper shotgun. A tv is far more dull than I expected. I suppose that shooting a plugged-in-and-running tv might be interesting but I digress.

Anyhow, guns are awesome things…in both good and bad ways. I truly enjoy target shooting…that’s one of the good-awesome aspects of shooting. So, a friend of mine at work often heads to the shooting range with me at lunch. This week, Emily came along with us too. She wanted to shoot her Valentine’s day gun (and you thought I wasn’t a romantic).

38 bullet splattered on a hard drive

So, my friend and I work at an IT business. We are both involved in developing software but we often get old or crashed computers in that are headed for the big website in the sky. We always recycle every bit of equipment that comes in. Part of that includes destroying the hard drives to protect any information that might be on them. Eventually, every hard drive gets shredded in a super cool shredder machine that eats them like a paper shredder chews stupid credit card offers.

Ricochets

Anyhow, that gives us an opportunity to pre-destroy the hard drives via bullet. We took two hard drives to the range the other day and shot them with a bunch of different guns. The one that surprised me most was the 38 caliber bullet. If you look carefully, you can see how it ricocheted off of the hard drive face. I couldn’t believe it! How could a bullet not pass through a simple hard drive?! One bullet splattered on impact. Why oh why 38 are you so weak?

45 through the top left, .223 through the bottom right and beside the splattered 38

We stepped it up a bit with other calibers and had great success with the 45 caliber and the .223 (typical assault rifle ammo). I knew those bullets would penetrate but I was incredibly surprised about the 38.

So friends, if you ever find your self in possession of a hard drive that simply needs to be shot, I can heartily recommend only calibers larger than the pitiful 38!