Disposing of old hard drives

[sadkingbilly]

Have you considered nuking the site from orbit?

overkill IMO. from orbit, no nuke required, KE will do the job as well.

[b0redom]

The boards are very seldom interchangeable. Ask any specialist data recovery guys.

So if you are in a hurry, just smash and dispose of the circuit boards.
Not perfect, but probably secure enough.

Weirdly enough, I *have* actually done this. As long as you can find an identical drive you can swap over the PCBs and get access to the data. I had to do it a while back for a mate who's drive had gone bad with a bunch of important (to him) data which hadn't been backed up. So, basically WTFH said.

[ladymuck]

I had a load of old hard drives that required disposal. I took them apart, smashed up the platters and then just chucked it all in the normal rubbish bin.

[sadkingbilly]

Here ye go...
The SKB patent data destroyer!

[WTFH]

Here ye go...
The SKB patent data destroyer!

From memory, Suity was quite good at destroying data, but not necessarily intentionally.

[northernladuk]

Here ye go...
The SKB patent data destroyer!

To be fair I've found the cases pretty tough for a large hammer. I've got one with a pointy end, maybe a roofers hammer or something and find the pointy end to be much more useful. I can be sure i've pierced the case and destroyed the disk with it,

[sadkingbilly]

To be fair I've found the cases pretty tough for a large hammer. I've got one with a pointy end, maybe a roofers hammer or something and find the pointy end to be much more useful. I can be sure i've pierced the case and destroyed the disk with it,

well, i've hud nae borra.
maybe I have a natural talent??

[Yuri F]

for small 2.5'' HDDs you just need two hands and pair of pliers or crimp tool.
fold in half and job is done (data-holding platter is broken/fractured to pieces).

3.5'' are harder to break (more metal), big nail in the one-third from center and hammer can do the job just fine to break platter.

some drives are hybrid (have memory chip cache), so destroying spinning platter will leave some data on memory chips.
some are encrypted.
but it is theoretically possible to recover some sectors even from broken platter (magnetic disk).
some have hardware wipe-out function which works superfast (but you've mentioned avoiding wiring them up scenario).

SSDs would require destroying chip.

[BurningRanger]

Metal drill bit. Drill. 5 Minutes. 2-4 holes each. Done.

[Smartie]

overkill IMO. from orbit, no nuke required, KE will do the job as well.

It's the only way to be sure...