Hello !

Since I always have some sensitive data on my harddisks .......

Since 1980 I had several computers. I mostly took the harddisk out whenever the computer had reached his end.

Now I have a lot of old hardisks from 10mb to 2 gb etc.

Some of them I can read so they are not the problem. I can clean them completely and afterwards rewrite them a couple of times with all kind of ïnteresting "data and then destroy them.

But the others are not accessible any more.

I have screwed the disks out of them but now.....

Is it sufficient to play a mambo with a hammer on them or should I saw them in nice peaces?

What is your opinion?

Thanks for your reply.

CloudBuilder

I prefer fire. The disks are just a type of plastic and burning them will not only char them but warp them and damage the tracks. Just my personal preference.

At work, they crush them (with a hydraulic V-press) and then put them through an industrial shredder (there's some cool "shred of the day" videos at ssiworld.com - an industrial shredder manufacturer ).

Steps:

1) Rub large, powerful magnet against surface of disk for several minutes.

2) Use hammer to break into pieces

3) Clump the pieces in small area use thermite

You could just skip to step 3, but I bet you don't have thermite on hand, in which case, you can try to burn them ...

One word:

SLEDGEHAMMER

hitting it with a hammer should be sufficient.

All that violence.

There are uses for dead drives.

Hi,

Just take the platters out and submerge in a acid bath.

Gone! Not exactly Eco friendly.

Send them all to me, I have a "top secret" superior system.

sand the magnetic surface off of them

I prefer Angle Grinder, ah the sound of sweet music.

CAUTION: Flying debris can be very dangerous, please ensure that you wear protective clothing if destroying disks in a violent manorespecially protect your eyes!

Seriously, you should be fine using a very strong electrical magnet to destroy the data and it cuts down on the risk of personal injury

I drive nails through mine. It takes less work than smashing. Also, it probably works better with heated nails.

Install Vista, I don't know any better way to mess a disk up.

Sanding the surface should suffice, although I seriously doubt that they're usable at this point, anyway. I don't believe there are any hackers still running 8088s or 80486s, even if the drives could be reassembled. If you couldn't access them, most likely neither can anyone else.

BTW- I like the dead drives project link from crashmeister.

Cheers