Just to clarify, I tend to only throw away drives that are already problematic (suffered a failure) or are obsolete (old scsi drives from old macs, whatever). I know even then that's no guarantee that bits won't be recovered from a determined agent with deep pockets. I view it more of a deterrent along the lines of a lock on a screen door - it keeps out the casual thieves. ;) Plus, I get a small amount of pleasure in disassembling and destroying high-precision electronics. Especially if it's a drive that caused me problems. The only part of my process I wondered about was the magnets. I use pretty strong ones, but even then I wasn't sure if they were adding any value. Sounds like "probably not". So, yeah... probably overkill. But it amuses me. Speaking of strong magnets, at my previous employer the "fun cube toys" were magnets from inside end-of-lifed or failed hard disks. There are some pretty strong magnets in there - at least in the drives we were using five years ago or so. -Rob On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 10:46 PM, Jason Hsu <jhsu802701 at jasonhsu.com> wrote: > Like several others, I recommend Darik's Boot and Nuke. Even the most > minimal algorithm (one pass of filling the drive with zeros) is enough to > render the data on the drive unrecoverable. Yes, I tried this out with > TestDisk, which was able to recover data before the first pass with DBAN > and unable to recover ANYTHING after one pass of filling the drive with > zeros. > > As long as the drives still work, I recommend DBAN. I think it's a waste > to destroy a WORKING hard drive. > > If the drives don't work, then I recommend destroying the platters inside. > I recently had to destroy a hard drive. I was able to find the > screwdriver I needed for taking the drive apart at a Runnings store. It > was interesting to see what was inside the hard drive. I took out the > platter, scratched it up, and disposed of the hard drive remnants at a > local household hazardous waste disposal site. > > -- > Jason Hsu <jhsu802701 at jasonhsu.com> > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20120120/fb055d33/attachment.html>