Erasing A Dead Hard Drive

Dear readers. Am I being paranoid? The hard drive in my iMac died a couple of weeks ago. After getting it replaced, I asked for the old drive to be returned to me so that I could ensure that there was no data I couldn’t get from it and to be certain that no one else accessed any of data.

Once I got the dead drive home, I popped it into an enclosure to ensure that it was truly dead. The drive didn’t appear with any of the recovery tools I have handy so I’m reasonably assured that it is an ex-hard drive. So how do I now dispose of it?

I attended a presentation by some data recovery guys a couple of years ago. These guys said that they were able to recover over 90 per cent of the data on a drive that had been erased and over-written several times AND had some holes drilled into it.

My dead drive seems to have a damaged controller but I suspect that my data is sitting on the platters. Not that I think that there’s anything too valuable on the drive but I suppose some enterprising geek could extract the platters or rig up a different controller and get some data.

Reading around, it seems that the advice is to physically destroy the drive using power tools. That sounds like fun.

What do you recommend?


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