Having experienced two seasons of fires and one mandatory five minute notice evacuation we realized that among other things we have too many important items dispersed in too many places to adequately accommodate a last minute evacuation.  So we've been doing some house cleaning and now have ten  fifteen HDs that have been copied to a portable HD and need to be disposed of.  There are a lot of recommendations on line but so far I have narrowed it down to either using a demagnetizer or drilling holes though the unit.  Do you folks have any better more effective suggestions? Obviously due to the fire hazard, using a blast furnace is out of the question. 

Thank you.

How much time do you want to spend on it? The easiest/timely solution here is the drilling method. Although it won't technically erase the data on the disks themselves, you'll have damaged them enough that it's not viable to extract data off of. If you want to take the really secure method, I would "zero" out the drives (you can do this via command line on Windows) or encrypt them, then drill. If you don't have a drill, encrypting the drive or zero-ing it several times should also do the trick. Just keep in mind encrypting and zero-ing out drives can take some time.

Edited November 1, 20205 yr by strid3r

Thank you. So far, drilling seems to be the most recommended as I have already pulled all the drives and to hook them up to to zero them out would take far more time than just drilling.   I guess the magnetizing suggestion is not effective.

Do you have something like this locally to you?

https://renewcomputers.com/data-security/

They will go into a chipper / shredder, but are vulnerable up to that point.  Drilling through the platters would "fix" that. 

Edited November 1, 20205 yr by Grahame

A hammer and a nail set works too.

The computer recyclers around here do not shred the HDs and more importantly do not let you witness their destruction.  So Drilling sill seems to be the front runner.  

How about soaking in a bath of Muriatic acid?

 

go to one of the sites selling magnets and buy a 1 tesla magnet, or bigger. they are cheap.

take the drive apart all the way to the platters, and swipe the magnet on both sides of each platter several times in several directions.

not even the nsa will be able to get the data back.

one of these is way more than enough

https://www.kjmagnetics.com/proddetail.asp?prod=DX0C

Thank you Kevin.

I think I'd just drill 3 or 4 holes in it and call it a day. It's nearly impossible to reconstruct at that point and unless the NSA really is after your data, probably 10x what you need to do.

actually even easier assuming the drive is glass platters, open up the top and fill with battery acid. the plating comes right off the glass.

 

Or once you have the platters, run them through your cross-cut paper shredder.

I want to avoid taking the drives apart as that takes too long, and I just discovered all of my drill bits are wimpy wood bits so off to Home Depot tomorrow.

Thanks for all the advice.

If the drives support Secure Erase, use that.