Disposing of hard drives

[Theodoric]

You'd think people would be wiser by now, but apparently many are still carelessly disposing of their PCs full of personal information. Personally I'd always use one of those utilities that overwrites the whole hard drive.

In theory, I suppose extracting the actual disk and abrading it on a linisher might be more secure, but extracting the disk is easier said than done; I tried it once and the darned thing did its very best to stay in place!

[MovedGoalPosts]

There are plenty of utilities for overwriting data. Problem is that many computer users aren't that aware of how things work internally on their PC. After all delete does imply bye bye doesn't it.

[Millay]

I find the best remedy is a hammer, or as we did at a a place i worked, drop them 5 floors onto concrete..

[SnoopZ]

Originally Posted by Millay

I find the best remedy is a hammer, or as we did at a a place i worked, drop them 5 floors onto concrete..

Agreed. I've also dismantled and rubbed the plates with sandpaper.

[Halcyon]

Yep I find that the best way is to get in there with a screwdriver and a pair of scissors and completly destroy the drive.

[ADd]

Best way is fire, works a treat with all forms of information, loads of fuel and a lighter, O and stand back

[Stonker]

Or just keep the hard drive, and get rid of the rest of it !

[bmxbandit]

i take them apart, play with the magnets (until i get careless and they shatter!) and use the platters as coasters

[MadGamer]

Originally Posted by Millay

I find the best remedy is a hammer, or as we did at a a place i worked, drop them 5 floors onto concrete..

Ditto, as was pointed out on BBC 1 News this morning

[v0id]

Originally Posted by bmxbandit

i take them apart, play with the magnets (until i get careless and they shatter!) and use the platters as coasters

I'm not the only one that does it then

[COL]

i seen a progamme on tv last week, where people who threw there computers away on places like the tip an alike.
there computers ended up in nigeria where the were broken down and sold on again.
there were gangs that bought the drives and took personell infomation off them, and then used this infomation to get loans and stuff.
its was interesting and shocking to the amount of money they could make by this.
it was around 15 pounds for 10 hard drives an they made somethimg stupid like 10,000 per drive on average, some were into the million figures

[Siuko]

We use DBan at work - http://dban.sourceforge.net/ - you can get it as a bootcd or boot floppy image.

It has DoD and Gutmann wiping methods which in theory should be able to clear hard drives of all data. We tried it at work and only found files using a partition undelete program that should have been there such as formatting information etc.

I dont know how truely good they are against Professional Expensive undelete methods but I would have thought if they are using DoD methods it would be fairly good!

Oh yeah and its FREE!

[matt_2k34]

i have a habit of dismantling them / destroying anything visable or just bashing it


Normal reason for throw away of hdd is due to failure tho so not much of a prob for me

[Halcyon]

Problem is that you think it's going to be easy but getting into the actual Hard Drive casing is blooming hard. I spent ages getting the plates out.

[TheNorm]

Has anyone tried drilling a hole though a hard drive? That should knacker it.