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Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Destroy Hard Drives?
First time accepted submitter THE_WELL_HUNG_OYSTER writes "I have 10-15 old hard drives I want to trash, some IDE and some SATA. Even if I still had IDE hardware, I don't want to wait several weeks to run DBAN on all of them. I could use a degausser, but they are prohibitively expensive. I could send them to a data destruction firm, but can they be trusted? What's the fastest, cheapest DIY solution?"
Remember: when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Just fun.
...delete all other copies.
They should magically become unreadable.
Basically, or is that acidically...
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
When I worked as a Data Security Tech we formatted them with 1's and 0's 7 times before crushing them with a drill press. NO ONE could recover that data.
You crushed them with a drill press? Here's a tip: the switch on the drill press makes the pointed thing spin, and you can turn the handle to make the pointed thing put holes in the hard drives. It's much less work than crushing them.
John
It's the only way to be sure
In the Air Force, we had EOD take care of the problem.
With C4.
And I'm not making this up. The drives weren't working, so we couldn't just wipe them, and EOD was bored and had explosives...
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In this case its a very very fun hammer.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
That's why you become a professional mourner. Show up at open-box funerals, ask if the current client is due to be cremated, then slip the HD into the casket!
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I just give my old hdd's to Icelandic bankers. You wouldn't believe how adept at destroying all kinds of evidence they've become.
-- Chaos, panic, pandemonium... My job here is done!
It was his favourite hard drive, he would have wanted to to take it with him...
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey