Bricking USB-C hard for presentation.

[phil.hagen]

We are testing our computer products for disaster recovery. I have come up with an idea to make a presentation that will drive the point home. To make this work for our presentation, I need to damage a USB-C drive. When I say damage, I mean make it unable to read or recover any data. While traveling in Asia, I acquired some very cheap small size external USB-C hard drives. I have the pinout map of said drives. I have a USB-C cable that I have striped on one end I will connect to a breadboard. My question is could someone recommend pins to short at a specific voltage that should leave the drives useless. I am not concerned with bricking the drives. I acquired the hard drives for just that purpose. Thanks for any help.

 

[Martaine2005]

I would think shorting VBUS to GND would do the trick. Or reversing their polarity.
Why not open the drive and remove some components?. You could then put it back to a usable state after.

Martin

 

[phil.hagen]

Hey, thanks for the reply. What does reversing their polarity mean? Thanks

 

[Harald Kapp]

What does reversing their polarity mean?

Swap "+" and "-". However, this will most likely physically destroy the USB Stick - not just brick it. If that is what you want, go for it.
But: physically damaged components are likely to be un-salvageable. Do you want to read and possibly restore the contents of the NAND FLASH chip(s)? Then the FLASH at least may not be damaged.
Can you supply more detail about what you can accept and what not?

 

[davenn]

We are testing our computer products for disaster recovery.

And how does bricking a drive aid in disaster recovery ? .. brick the drive and there is ZERO recovery
I am desperately trying to see the point of your exercise ???

 

[kellys_eye]

Sounds to me like someone wants to make a USB lead that deliberately trashes any USB-C storage device that gets attached. As with @davenn I fail to see the reason behind the exercise as an example of 'disaster recovery' since there IS no recovery!