Best Way to Clean Hard Drive

[Pigeon]

Clamp it in a vice and drill a few 1/4 " holes through it.....then take it out to a long pier and throw it in the ocean.

That's a modified version of Al Gore's wipe disk and format. In his the disk is tossed from a plane on the flight to Fiji.

[Happyslap Buddha]

I heard the military spent millions on prototype gadgets to try and wipe data. Tried magnets, plasma, whatever.... Nothing worked. In the end they realized the only way to wipe a hard drive is to take it to the yard and smash it to smithereens.

I saw the data can be recovered even after 5 wipes.

You might not sleep well till you burn the thing.

[Pigeon]

belt sander on the platters

[TraumaT]

I heard somewhere that you can microwave parts of the hard drive, and that it is the only way to destroy data completely.

Being the complete and utter techno idiot that I am, I have no idea if this is true, hahaha.

[Dr Exile]

I vowed I would not respond to a Royal thread, but I don't hold a grudge very well and I could not resist this one.

Here is what I did.

I lived on a boat at the time. (Sea water, a bay on the Pacific Ocean.)

I put the computer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, and printer on the dock and put it all together, plugged it in, booted it up, then sat on my but and kicked the whole shebang overboard. The fireball from the monitor was spectacular. It took the marina a week to restore power to the dock. Said computer is now fish habitat.

[TraumaT]

It took the marina a week to restore power to the dock.

And I bet you were a very popular guy at the marina during that week, hahahaha! Sounds fun with the fireball, though. Take a pic next time you want to kill a computer!

[Pigeon]

The magnetic particles on the drive platters need to be altered or removed.

[TraumaT]

The magnetic particles on the drive platters need to be altered or removed.

So would it work to microwave them?

[Pigeon]

Does not seem like a good method but I really do not know. I imagine a diskette would get warped up real good though.

[Pigeon]

Metal objects in a microwave tend to destroy the microwave unit.