How to dispose of old hard drives

coffeehound

A place I worked used to have the workshop cut them in half on a bandsaw witnessed by two men of unknown identity

PRAISETHESUN

Zero-fill them using something like DBAN, then they should be fine to recycle through any e-waste recycling center. Failing that, go to town with magnets and/or hammers/drills

vacheron

PRAISETHESUN said:

Zero-fill them using something like DBAN, then they should be fine to recycle through any e-waste recycling center. Failing that, go to town with magnets and/or hammers/drills

All good apart from the the magnet option. I saw somewhere that, unlike floppy disks, to have any effect on the contents of a hard drive whatsoever, the magnet would need to exert about half a ton of force, which would be the equivalent of a rare earth magnet costing a few £100's, about the size of a shoebox, and incredibly dangerous to use!

Remember that there are very powerful magnets inside of hard drives sitting a couple of CM from the spinning platters for years on end, and these have no detrimental effect on the data at all. 

GDB2222

https://www.screwfix.com/p/magnusson-fibreglass-handled-club-hammer-2-lb-1-0kg-/9984V

25_Years_On

I take the discs out and use them as coasters.

jamesd

With spinning drive the circuitry these days normally contains drive configuration information and it's relatively hard to recover data from a drive with no board. Not impossible if you're a government with a lot of money to spend on the job.

This wasn't always true. Back in the days of MFM drives I recovered a customer's 10 megabyte drive with a board swap,

GDB2222

jamesd said:

With spinning drive the circuitry these days normally contains drive configuration information and it's relatively hard to recover data from a drive with no board. Not impossible if you're a government with a lot of money to spend on the job.

This wasn't always true. Back in the days of MFM drives I recovered a customer's 10 megabyte drive with a board swap,

It is probably enough to cut any ribbon connectors and lever some chips off the board, then just put the thing in the bin. Then, the work involved in recovering data is out of all proportion to the value of the data. 

pogofish

Open them up and pee on the discs themselves - the chemical action/corrosion with the disc coating and the urine will render it completely unreadable in no-time at all! 

unforeseen

Format the discs and throw them in the normal rubbish.

The chances of anybody digging them out of a landfill and forensically restoring the data is infintesimally small. 

[Deleted User]

unforeseen said:

Format the discs and throw them in the normal rubbish.

The chances of anybody digging them out of a landfill and forensically restoring the data is infintesimally small. 

Probably the worst advice, no need for hard disks to go in landfill, there are plenty of materials that can be usefully recycled from a hard disk - many companies will 100% recycle hard disks without anything going to landfill at all.

Here's a local firm we use for our business:

https://www.conceptmanagement.co.uk/services/data-security/hard-drive-recycling

Zero landfill policy.