How to Dispose of a Hard Drive
In 5 easy steps:
- Find hammer
- Give up on finding hammer…grab pliers
- Attack drive with pliers, destorying circuitry but leaving platters untouched
- Cut finger, swear and bleed profusely on drive
- Repeat steps 3 & 4 until you realize that nobody cares enough about your data to read it directly from platters. Toss drive in trash, go grab a band-aid
Tada!
View Brian Krausz's profile
Dude, magnets! Way less bleeding involved.
I opted for the sledge last time I had a drive to dispose of… it worked well enough, though I was surprised how tough the housing was, taking quite a few blows before coming apart…
Whatever happened to dd?
If you have an OS X install disk, pull up the Disk Utility on it, find the option to overwrite the drive a bunch of times, and go to town. There’s probably another simple way for other OSes, but I haven’t had need to try with them yet.
1) unmount drive
2) dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
Optional:
3) While you wait, go to Amazon and buy a Torx driver (T8, iirc?) to make opening the drive case easy
4) Open drive case to extract fun magnets and physically destroy platter if you’re paranoid.
Bonus points for those who answered “0) Just throw drive into trash can” because they’re already using full-disk encryption.
Just drill a few holes through the drive and it will no longer be usable.
eh… Darik’s Boot And Nuke.
Then split the case open with a crowbar and hammer.
hit the spindle with the hammer to pop out the platters then snip into pieces with pincers.
Using overwhelming force(crowbar,hammer) makes the hardware side of the job take 5 mins tops.
Right tools for the job
http://www.myconfinedspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/11/hit-it-crowbar.jpg
That’s environmentally irresponsible. Why not make a good go of securely erasing the disk, and then return it to the manufacturer? Certainly, in my part of the world (the UK), it’s illegal to throw the disk in the bin, and a requirement that the manufacturer take it back. Most manufacturers have a published policy of erasing returned drives.
It’s a small hard drive. I tried to recycle it with my laptop but Best Buy wouldn’t take the drive. I agree that it’s not ideal but it’s better than throwing out the whole laptop.