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?

Comments

Re:Do it the old fashioned way - shoot em!

[Xzzy]

I take a different approach.. I'm the resident hard drive collector as well, except I take them apart and extract the magnets. The older they are the better, drives from the late 90's seem to have the best ones. Modern desktop drives have pussy magnets. :( Seagate 73 gig fiber channel disks have the best magnets I've ever pulled.

Of course, the hard part is doing something productive with them. They're really not good for much, except for marveling how cool magnetism is. Eddy currents are a good crowd pleaser.. made a pendulum type device with a led wired up to a coil, as it swung past a magnet the led would flicker.

Also, this:

http://xzzy.org/files/geek/eddy/eddy.avi

Know a guy who would make such projects and donate them to schools as educational toys.. schools are always glad for stuff like that.

Re:Do it the old fashioned way - shoot em!

[arminw]

....Of course, the hard part is doing something productive with them...

I take the magnets out and use the best ones on our refrigerator. I give the rest to friends for that purpose.

Before doing this I connect them to a drive dock, specifically this one:

http://www.wiebetech.com/products/ComboDock.php

I look at any files worth keeping and copy these to another modern HD. Since HD space is cheap these days, I have several complete DOS drive images on file. After that I let the computer do a multi-pass full data scramble erasure. This can take quite a while on big drives.

After the magnets are extracted, the left over pieces go to a metal recycler. The cases are usually made from many beer cans worth of aluminum.

Re:Do it the old fashioned way - shoot em!

[Nefarious Wheel]

Actually the disks make excellent drop spindle wheels, if you're into spinning thread the old fashioned way. I have friends who do this.