I have ~10 HDDs that I’d like to dispose of. For a while, I tended to buy unwarrantied used disks for my NAS, so these have all failed in some form or another over the years. I can’t just toss them, because they have my (unencrypted) data on them, but I can’t wipe them either since they don’t mount anymore. I want a simple and reliable way to render the contents unrecoverable. A nation state is not part of my threat model, but any kind of data reconstruction that could be bought with civilian money is.
I’ve tried:
- Smashing with tools (largely ineffective)
- Punching holes with a drill press (how many holes are needed to ruin the disk? Also I’ve broken/dulled a few bits doing this)
Warrantied drives still fail, they just happen to ship you a replacement.
Commercial drive trashing solutions are basically a smaller, fancier version of the mechanism in a log splitter.
You could probably rig a sketchy drive wedge/bending thing with a pump jack rather easily.
Wear PPE.
The odds of someone taking a failed drive and transplanting the platters to a working drive is pretty low to begin with.
Me? I don’t have tons of drives to destroy, so I just unscrew the thing, get the platters out and smash those.