I have 3 old hard drives with data sensitive enough that i'd feel better having them properly destroyed as opposed to throwing them in the trash. The data includes personal and business financial information, with bank account numbers, passwords, etc.. I'm thinking I should just take a sledge hammer to them and dump them in my garbage, but are there better options which don't cost a lot for data which is really only important to me or some scammer?
You can have it overwrite the drive bit by bit in patterns, the more times the harder it is to recover things (and would require take-the-platters-out-and-read-the-magnets level recovery).
Though pulling out the platters and smashing them is really easy and kind of fun if you've never disassembled a hard drive before.
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Use software to clear it, then sledgehammer it Pull out the magnets for later fun. Make sure you warp the platters, beating the HDD probably isn't enough.
If it is extremely sensitive, I would use a tool like dban to erase, pull the platter, drill a couple holes and store it until next time you have a big fire and toss them in.
My brother in law has a quasi forge in his garage that I use for mine
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Hard drive destruction
Pull out the magnets for later fun. Make sure you warp the platters, beating the HDD probably isn't enough.
