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How to Say Goodbye to Old Hard Drives?
An anonymous reader writes "I'm wondering if anyone else out there has a stack of old hard drives sitting around and doesn't know what to do with them. I always remove the hard drives of my parents' and friends' computers before they recycle them or get a new computer, so now I've got a whole bunch sitting around. One, I'd like to dispose of them and know that whatever data was there is gone, but before that, I'd like to hook them up, one by one, and scan them to make sure there's nothing vital there worth saving. Some are years old and may be totally dead for all I know, but is there a good system for hooking up a hard drive as an additional device, perhaps via USB? And what's a pretty good way to ensure that someone else won't pull them out later on and find usable data?" Well to start with you could always use your hard drives to make electricity or create a decorative wind chime. There are also many different options to ensure that your data doesn't fall into the hands of the enemy. What other suggestions can folks come up with?
http://dban.sourceforge.net/
To 'clean' the drives.
Sledgehammer works good too.
We always take them apart. The magnets are fun to play with.
As far as disposal: open up the drives, take out the platters and use them for decorations or melt them, salvage the armature magnets for your refrigerator, recycle the metal.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
like this
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.