So You Want to Destroy a Hard Drive - Comments Page 2

Bleachbit. If it's good enough for Hillary, it's good enough for me!

I remove the hard drives from the old computer, retrieve the rare earth magnets (I don't know what I'm going to do with them), and then use a shop grinder to shred the hard drive into pieces, chips and dust and then dump half of it into the trash, wait a couple of weeks and then dump the other half.

Hard drives make very good target practice material. A half dozen or so shots from an AR, AK, or 308 will disable a hard drive.

In the early 90's a couple of my colleagues went on a data recovery course including 3.5" floppies.

Part of the course was to try to wreck floppies with rules including , you had to have all the bits and you couldn't leave the room. The last rule was introduced when the course was held at a military research base. The attendees took the disk out of the room and returned with a smouldering lump in a container held on the end of long tongs held in heavy gloves.

I think good target practice is maybe the bust way.

Frankly, I find all this talk of physically destroying hard drives, which are amongst the most refined pieces of technology we can own, unnecassarily brutal!
Modern drives have tracks which are a tiny fraction of a micron across, so the days when forensic experts could recover trails of data left at side of the tracks are long gone.
Just over-writing all the data once with a suitable utility program should be quite enough to stop anyone (and in any case, who wants to?) from obtaining any files: using a multiple over-write option is also possible for the ultra-careful...

What? No mention of opening the case and using a common blow torch to heat the platter until it loses its magnetic coherence? I found it remarkably quick and less dangerous than beating with a hammer. Though I could see where shooting a platter for target practice could be fun. :)

Bach in the 70's, while in the military, I worked in a large computer facility located in a foreign (semi-hostile) country. We had very large disk drives (the size of a washing machine). Each drive had a thermite grenade in a small container sitting on top. In the event of a hostile takeover we were to pull the pins and run. We all looked forward to the time when we'd get to do this. Unfortunately peace broke out and we never got to witness the expected carnage.

Wow! What are you storing on your drives that require that level of destruction?
If you a really that concerned break out the platters and randomly dispose of them, after mutilating if you must, but I'm guessing most of your data is already up in the cloud and therefore well out of your reach. I do like the thermite solution though :)

I've only destroyed 2 HDDs, but I have a friend who's a welder.
BTW: To destroy an HDD with heat, it needs to get to 1100 degrees centigrade, and then cooled to below 900 degrees centigrade - the cobalt will oxidize to Co3O4 (cobalt tetraoxide), then when cooled, it loses three oxygen atoms and 2 cobalt atoms and becomes CoO (cobalt oxide) which is unreadable by any known method (magnetic, laser, electronic, re-imaging, etc.).

Bob, I think your shredding idea is the safest and most eco way destroy a hard drive.

I am sure that using at most two "military grade" wiping utilities would render any hard drive completely unreadable. There must be something terrible that would make a person wish to destroy HDD.
Some time ago Bob listed a utility that would access a HDD's native drive wiping function that is normally not accessible to the user for data safety reasons. This and one other good wiping agent, set to multiple passes would defeat even the most arduous attempts at data recovery.
If you wish to then destroy the disks, the above advice to scrape or sand the shiny platters could finish them off. And also as mentioned above, the magnets inside are super strong and very useful around the house.

I forgot to mention the principle of obscurity by anonymity. If the HDD is of useful capacity, rather than destroying it just wipe it thoroughly as I detailed in my message above, then copy some benign files like landscapes or classical music on it and drop off at a thrift store. I hate to see waste.

I was really hoping that someone else would contribute, but the comments have stopped, so here is the info on "Secure Erase" from Bob himself:

https://askbobrankin.com/securely_erasing_your_hard_drive.html

...NIST (the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology) rates it as good as degaussing a hard drive - that is, using a powerful magnet to completely scramble the bits stored on a drive. So why haven’t we been using “Secure Erase” for all these years?

...Most BIOS developers disable the “Secure Erase” feature because they think consumers won’t use it wisely. Indeed, “SE,” as it’s called, is a “nuclear option.” It wipes data, and no amount of panicked, tearful phone calls to tech support or data recovery specialists will get it back. It even wipes data stored in bad disk blocks, something other disk-wiping utilities can’t do. When Secure Erase finishes its job, your hard drive will be squeaky clean

Unlock the Power

A freeware utility called HDDErase 4.0 unlocks the power of the Secure Erase feature in nearly every standard magnetic hard drive built since 2001. You can download it from the UC-San Diego’s Center for Memory and Recording Research, but note that no tech support is available and you use it at your own risk. Because it runs from a bootable disk, HDDErase can erase any operating system, using the drive's own built-in sanitizer. Tim Fisher’s review of HDDErase provides a little more insight into this powerful command-line utility.

I've read in various places that HDDErase will work on SSDs (solid state drives) in addition to traditional spinning magnetic hard drives. But the documentation for the program does not mention SSDs at all. However, this article on the Kingston Technology website seems authoritative, and does specifically mention using HDDErase with SSDs.

There is one important caveat, though, according to Kingston. HDDErase can only be run on hard drives that are directly attached to a SATA or IDE port, and not through a USB bridge or enclosure. Put more simply, HDDErase will ONLY work on internal drive, and WILL NOT work on external hard drives.

I like most of the ways to kill a harddrive. I like the good old way of a very large tool to make them small, like pancake.

When I need to destroy a hard drive i dismantle it and I take the aluminum discs; whose melting temperature is 1,220 degrees Fahrenheit. I put them into my mini barbecue grill to smelt them using THE BEST Hardwood charcoal that burns at 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit. Putting a small fan on high speed 1 foot away next to the grill raises the charcoals temperature to 2,000 degrees which will melt the aluminum discs into molten blob within 1 hour.
When the aluminum cooled enough to be handled i drilled holes into the blob and made it into a necklace. Data restoration is impossible using this method of destroying a hard drive.