How to wipe desktop hard drive before disposal

Nasqueron

Simplest way is hire a secure shredder who will come on site or collect and take them away (depending on business rules)

Yes secure wipe is a pain but there you go. Doing the ones I used to do with Blancco the 3x secure pass would take overnight and you needed to save the certificate to prove you'd done it. If it's not HM level of destruction then probably be done in 2 1/2 hours or so with free cleaners.

johnjp

I use old hard drives for external storage.
Later SATA drives are good as they have more `room`.
I get an adapter for under £10 and just plug it in, back up photos, music etc.
I do also have micro sd cards as back up but feel better about having something that is much less easy to lose down the side of the couch!

abssorb

You don't need to destroy a hard drive for domestic use. To protect credit card data, which is encrypted anyway, wiping with DBAN etc as others have said is more than adequate.

Yes, the risk is non-zero, but so is the risk of winning the lottery.

Someone at a government dept once told me that people always assess the threat risk the wrong way, particularly techies. Techies only assess a technical problem from a technical perspective, often way into the realms of academic theory.
Criminals don't think like that. If they are within geographical proximity of your discarded HDD, then they are probably within some proximity of you. Much easier to break your legs to get your secrets than mess about reassembling HDDs.

So one perspective is if you don't have anything worth having your legs broken, then you clearly don't have anything worth shredding a HDD for.
Just an amusing perspective.

steviebuk

interstellaflyer wrote: »

Really? I have and old 2006 vintage Compaq Presario with Windows XP on it in my workshop and it works perfectly well for general admin, watching DVDs, listening to music etc, the only thing i don't do is use it for internet. I accept that XP is finished from a support point of view but there are people who just want a word processor.

Yeah that's fine. XP is still fine as long as not connected to the Internet.