don’t be worried. Yuri probably already has all that data. So does the NSA. If you want to be really sure, maybe the tiny torx to take it apart, then a drop or two of gallium on each platter head, which are usually made of aluminum. In a few hours, the pieces will be brittle and shatter.
Just take it to a daycare and hand it over to a group of 3-year-olds. It will be destroyed in no time.
yeah, blow it up! throw that cold pot roast and hard drive in the broken crockpot and blow it all up!
Or give it to my 12 year old. She will lose it within 10 minutes. She will lose it so hard it will never be seen again by anyone. Like it was lost into a black hole. Lost to the same spot as her iPhone, expensive earbuds, countless shoes (somehow??), other expensive items. Yep. This is the answer. Give it to my kid and you will never ever ever see it again.
So when I rebuild my back porch, I am not allowed to bury a skeleton underneath it.?? And yes, I do plan on burying a halloween skeleton decoration under the porch. I got the idea from a friend of mine that was planting a row of hedges next to the fence around his backyard and uncovered 2 skeletons wrapped in heavy duty canvas tarps that had been buried there....
You are not hitting it hard. A couple of big whacks with a sledge hammer will shatter the disc inside.
Save the only copy of your wedding pictures to the drive. That will ensure that it fails beyond any hope of data recovery.
For plastic or ceramic, they bend pretty good. I bend mine 90 degrees. Now, I admit most of my hard disks are pretty old and mostly WD. I'm sure there are newer ones that aren't metal. Ron Wanttaja
There is a freeware that will overwrite the data with 0s. Last time I had to send a warranty hard drive in I overwrote it I think 10 times. The recommendation I believe is 3 times to make sure you got every byte.
Work has one of these: https://www.semshred.com/product/model-0101-automatic-hard-drive-crusher/ Apparently there's a manual version out there too:
Some dry salt and plugging it in would probably do the trick. Hammer is quicker and more certain. Two swings at most.
If the platters are aluminum, lye based drain cleaner will work way better than salt water. "Dissolving" isn't on NIST's acceptable list, but it'll work.
I realize that this thread is about destroying a computer hard drive; however, I believe the underlying concern is the release of confidential personal data to undesirable recipients. Old hard drives retain data via non-volatile memory, and, in my opinion, the only way those data can be reliably removed (or made inaccessible) is to destroy the hard drives; however, don't forget that most modern printers also retain data via their own non-volatile memories. There might also be other peripheral devices that store your data separate from the CPU hard drive.
Definitely don't nuke them. All of your data would then be imprinted on the cosmic microwave background for the rest of time.
Hard drive smoke. Don't breathe it! I actually bought one of those blenders. Actually, while not used for hard drives, back in the day when the encryption gear used punched cards to set the keys, the security folk would have a blender to destroy the cards after use. If you read the book "The Falcon and the Snowman" about a guy who was stealing secrets from a defense contractor (true story), the security officers are making egg nog (alcoholic) in that blender. Amusingly, not too long after I read the book, I was sitting in the SCIF at Martin Marietta when the security officer came up with a blender full of eggnog. This was before she noticed the map of the world on my office wall was printed in Russian.
Take it to the edge of the Earth and drop it off. Segue to another discussion…. this one’s about run it’s course.
Power it up and smack it against something hard. Hear the heads mill the coating off the platter. Done.
All 0s is bad as a slight pattern could still exist "under" the 0s. At least 5 passes alternating patterns, then 2 passes random or an arbitrary string. 35 pass Gutmann if you have too much time and paranoia on your hands. The real question, what to do with old SSDs? They kinda lie to about actual location of data and idk if i can trust a hardware implemented "wipe" command.
