This might work, but you run the risk of burning yourself or breathing toxic fumes. Several Web sites suggest soaking the drive in diluted hydrochloric or muriatic acid. 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. Put it in a fire? There are lots of toxic chemicals in that gadget. I've heard and read all kinds of methods people use to destroy an old drive, some of which are downright dangerous. 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. The program's interface won't win any awards, but DBAN has a solid reputation among security experts.Īttack the platter to render a hard-disk unreadable 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. If they give you this spiel, call the cops and demand that they return the old hard drive to you, right then, right there.)įree data-wiping program obliterates your data And don't believe them if they say they returned the drive to the vendor. (On a related subject, don't ever let a computer repair shop hold onto your old hard drive if they replace it.
How to ensure that the data on the drives will be out of the bad guys' reach is another matter. You probably know that you need to completely wipe or remove the hard drives from your PCs before you donate or recycle them. Not everyone is so attached to their old electronic equipment as I am. (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.)
One benefit of holding onto these PC relics is not worrying about their data falling into the wrong hands. The jewel of my "collection" is an original 60-MHz Pentium PC, complete with the famous floating-point bug. Alongside the boxes of ancient paper records in our attic are about a half dozen old PCs. I've got stacks of old utility-bill statements dating back to the 1980s.