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Internal HD Disk Disposal/Disable Recommendations


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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.

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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 by strid3r
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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.

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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

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