In a tale that seems stranger than fiction, a man's 12-year quest to recover a lost fortune in Bitcoin has come to an abrupt end. James Howells, a British IT worker, has been forced to abandon his search for a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoins, worth an astonishing $800 million…
It’s also a futile attempt. In the off chance they even find it, that hard drive would be toast by then. In a landfill, that hard drive would prob be shattered and in pieces, not to mention probably corroded and unreadable.
It’s quite amazing how much data can be recovered from hard drives that have been even in fires. I think they recovered like 95% of the data from the hard drives on the challenger shuttle that blew up.
Shattered? Very unlikely. Corroded? Maybe, but probably not since hard drives are well sealed.
They would just need a section of the platter to be readable, they area with the sector that has the data they need. Even if the platter was shattered it would be possible to read the block you need.
The chances are low but the reward is worth the effort.
I’d wager all the machine compacting and shredding they do at a landfill would render any harddrive broken. Maybe it survived, but after all these years, I highly doubt it survived being expoded to the elements anyways
Hard drives, except for helium-filled ones, actually have an air hole in them with a filter attached to it so they can keep enough air in the drive so the heads can properly fly over the disk surface. Completely possible that moisture ingress would be an issue after years of sitting in a landfill in who knows what. It is a darn tiny hole though.