Best Way To Destroy A Computer Hard Drive

[thing1]

Drill through the casing with a power drill in lots of places.

I believe this is the one favoured by the Men in Black at our place when they have to do in the field data destruction without the drive shredders to hand.

[Bledlow]

Unless you're collecting the discarded HDDs round the back of MI5, GCHQ, or your friendly neighbourhood financial institution or other organisation with lots of juicy data, the chance of getting enough off a discarded drive to recoup the cost of salvaging it & searching is probably too low to make the effort.

Therefore, I reckon the only people likely to actually look at it are recyclers, looking to see if it's recoverable for less than they can sell it for, & any visible physical damage is going to lead them to bin it immediately.

[drossall]

Well, the goat extremities have to go, obviously.

<OT>The pictures that followed remind me of the teacher at my kids' school, who used to explain to his pupils how mountain goats had shorter legs on one side to allow them to stand upright on steep hill sides </OT>

[TimO]

<OT>The pictures that followed remind me of the teacher at my kids' school, who used to explain to his pupils how mountain goats had shorter legs on one side to allow them to stand upright on steep hill sides </OT>

Obviously he was wrong, that's the Mountain Haggis he was thinking of.

[bomber]

Throw it into the fires of mount doom?

[NotSuspicious]

We have something at work that looks like a small fridge with a drawer that opens in which you could fit two hard drives, although we just do one at a time.  Press a button and a massive magnetic force is generated then released through the disk.

If you were really worried and didn't have access to one of these then take the disks out and grind them to dust.

I have known people put them in an incinerator.  I would imagine that it would have been hot enough to melt everything but the disks!

[tonycollinet]

I'm a "prop it up between to bricks and hit with sledgehammer until the platters fall out" kind of guy.

TC jr sort of enjoys that also.

[noisycrank]

Archeologists have to be the real threat. I am sure I have seen bills from the ancient egyptians for a load of goats. Given Moore's law decription from a bashed HD should be no problem. On the other hand I have floppy from about '82 with a document written on a mac version of word as I recall which I am pretty sure is beyond reasonable recovery. Where has the mummy emoticon gone?   

[CommuteTooFar]

Archeologists have to be the real threat. ....

At the start of 21^st century we found out that women didn't wear clothes

[Salvatore]

Drill through the casing with a power drill in lots of places.

I believe this is the one favoured by the Men in Black at our place when they have to do in the field data destruction without the drive shredders to hand.

I once met someone who worked for the Foreign Office. He told us that in 1982 he was on standby to travel round S American embassies to destroy all sensitive data. He was armed with a Black and Decker (for hard drives) and an infra-red toaster (for microfiche).