The right way to destroy an old hard drive
I'm a confirmed pack rat. I've got stacks of old utility-bill statements dating back to the 1980s. Alongside the boxes of ancient paper records in our attic are about a half dozen old PCs. The jewel of my "collection" is an original 60-MHz Pentium PC, complete with the famous floating-point bug. Well, it was famous in 1994.
One benefit of holding onto these PC relics is not worrying about their data falling into the wrong hands. (OK, I suppose a determined thief could break into our attic and walk off with the computer antiques, but I wish them luck finding the cables and peripherals required to bring the machines back to life.)
Not everyone is so attached to their old electronic equipment as I am. You probably know that you need to completely wipe or remove the hard drives from your PCs before you donate or recycle them. How to ensure that the data on the drives will be out of the bad guys' reach is another matter.
(On a related subject, don't ever let a computer repair shop hold onto your old hard drive if they replace it. And don't believe them if they say they returned the drive to the vendor. If they give you this spiel, call the cops and demand that they return the old hard drive to you, right then, right there.)
Free data-wiping program obliterates your data
If you want to keep the drive usable but totally erased, use the free Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN), which comes in a version that runs off floppy disks and USB flash drives and another that runs off a CD or a DVD. The program's interface won't win any awards, but DBAN has a solid reputation among security experts.
Attack the platter to render a hard-disk unreadable
No matter how thorough a data-wiping program is, the only way to be certain that a hard-drive's data is unrecoverable is by rendering the drive's platters unspinnable. I've heard and read all kinds of methods people use to destroy an old drive, some of which are downright dangerous.
Put it in a fire? There are lots of toxic chemicals in that gadget. Do you really want to be breathing them or otherwise releasing them into the environment? Microwaves are handy for destroying CDs and DVDs, but you'd have to cook a hard drive for a long, long time to blister the drive's platters.
Several Web sites suggest soaking the drive in diluted hydrochloric or muriatic acid. This might work, but you run the risk of burning yourself or breathing toxic fumes. Lots of people recommend breaking out the power tools and drilling several holes through the drive. You can achieve the same effect by pounding some nails through it, or simply by whacking the heck out of it with a hammer, sledge or otherwise.
I'm normally a big fan of brute-force methods, for the vicarious thrill if for no other reason. But the goal is to make sure you can't spin the drive's platters. There's a more subtle approach that achieves this, without necessarily requiring safety goggles.
I found a great step-by-step tutorial written by David Gewirtz that describes how to disassemble a drive, remove the platters (and other components, including the drive's magnets), and sand or grind the platter surfaces, which renders them unreadable.
David's method requires the use of TORX driver bits to remove the small screws holding the drive's case in place. These can set you back about $20, but you might be able to save the money by using a large, flat-head screwdriver to pry the case off.
David also suggests degaussing the platters by placing them between neodymium magnets before grinding their surfaces, which obliterates the data they hold. This strikes me as overkill, but I guess you can't be too careful when protecting your private data. Making wind chimes out of the degaussed and sanded platters, as David's wife did, is strictly optional.
Dennis O'Reilly has covered PCs and other technologies in print and online since 1985. Along with more than a decade as editor for Ziff-Davis's Computer Select, Dennis edited PC World's award-winning Here's How section for more than seven years. He is a member of the CNET blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. 
Fact, if a drive fails under warranty you usually have to send the drive back to the vendor before they will give you a replacement. It 's completely absurd if repair shops are going to get the cops call on them everytime they actually try to do their job.
Trust no one with data you wouldn't freely share with the public.
pcfish Classified materials or not I don't want anyone looking at my personal data without my permission. :) Unless your a hardcore gamer looking for maximum frame rates, you aren't going to see much if any difference in performance. I run a media center PC several years old now with total drive encryption. It plays content localy and streams media to a console on my LAN without any hiccups what so ever. I believe your statement was true a few years ago with previous encryption technologies. However TrueCrypt is engineered very well. Speed is not an issue for encryption anymore.
Part 2 on recycling your drive and other electronic equipment will appear on March 30. Stay tuned!
Thanks,
Dennis
1. Mix a large amount of styrofoam with gasoline and Tide (washing detergent) in a large metal container.
2. Find an area safe from fire hazards (not near you house, in your backyard, etc. Go to a construction site where the only thing they've done is cleared the land and laid cement.)
3. Cover hard drive with napalm.
4. Light on fire.
5. Shoot roman candle at fire.
Much more fun.
1. Go to a machine shop and get some aluminum powder by sweeping the floor or the going through the shop vac.
2. Get iron oxide (rust), you can find it in paint stores (they usually sell it in powered form so people can mix it in paint as a pigment).
3. Mix 8 grams of iron oxide to 3 grams of aluminum powder. Mix thoroughly. Combine the mixture with Play-Doh or other similar material and knead thoroughly(4 parts thermite to 1 part Play-Doh or clay to make moldable). Thermite requires a high heat source to ignite, so dust off the old blasting caps or Det-Cord and have fun melting your hard drive!
Secondly - Overwriting using one of the many readily-available utilities, such as DBan, will suffice for nearly everyone. How likely is it that an identity thief will purchase your system on eBay, or Craigslist, or swipe it from the school to which you've donated it, or whatever, and spend hours reconstructing your data on the off-chance that he might be able to salvage a credit card number? If your privacy is so critical that you cannot take that chance, then you work for the government and already have access to the best prophylactic security measures in the industry. Otherwise - get over yourself.
To open it up all you need is one of those ratchet heads that conforms to any screw, they sell them every where. A hammer will take of it.
One of these decades, I will get around to destroying and recycling the hard drives. (grin)
Buy gunpowder: Available to any U.S. citizen at a sporting goods / guns supply store.
Stick hard drive in bucket of gunpowder
Light Gunpowder.
Sure, you may blow off a few limbs and possibly blind yourself, but you can rest assured that you're Identity and personal information is safe (note: you may be resting 6 feet under in a coffin, be warned).
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