Disposal of Old External Drives

Corona · 04 Jan 2023

Get a big black Sharpie, mark the HDs 'Hunter Biden' then leave them anonymously at any police station. They'll disappear never to be heard from again.

x509 · 04 Jan 2023

bro67 said:

5 pound mini sledge, tear apart and save the magnets, place platters in a fire pit and let them cook to death.

I had sold old Seagate drives I needed to get rid of. I took out all the screws holding the top cover in place, but the damn cover was still stuck on somehow. I ended up bashing the top with a sledgehammer until there were dents showing the platters inside.

Or, Western Digital has a drive recycling program. https://www.westerndigital.com/compa...s/easy-recycle

NavyLCDR · 04 Jan 2023

mike888 said:

I have some old external drives that contain mainly p*rn, a few family pics, but more worryingly derogatory comments I made about my relatives.

That is just ripe for a sarcastic and inappropriate comment that is really, really difficult for me to refrain from making!

Berton · 04 Jan 2023

x509 said:

I took out all the screws holding the top cover in place, but the damn cover was still stuck on somehow.

There's always one more screw holding that cover on, rub your finger firmly over the label and you'll find an indent. That screw fastens to the motor and stablizes the spinning of the disks/platters and also has to be removed.

NTN · 04 Jan 2023

Nice magnets inside too, you could use them on the fridge.

x509 · 04 Jan 2023

Berton said:

There's always one more screw holding that cover on, rub your finger firmly over the label and you'll find an indent. That screw fastens to the motor and stablizes the spinning of the disks/platters and also has to be removed.

Thanks, but about two weeks too late for me to do this. Too bad, I'm sure the magnets would come in handy some time. The magnets I've salvaged from dead 2.5" drives are themselves pretty strong, so imagine what 3.5" drive magnets would be like.

Steve C · 05 Jan 2023

mike888 said:

I have some old external drives that contain mainly p*rn, a few family pics, but more worryingly derogatory comments I made about my relatives.
I do not know which drive this material is on and probably because they are old I cannot get them to work using Windows 7 and get errors even trying to access the drives. I am not prepared to pay someone to recover the data even if this were possible.

Which leads me to disposal.In the past with drives I have removed all the screws,sometimes the platter explodes into tiny pieces but all this is a laborious process.

Would it be possible to use a drill with a metal bit and drill say three holes into each drive as surely this would make data recovery impossible or are "ordinary" metal bits not suitable for this process ?

I love smashing them to pieces with a lump hammer

tfwul · 06 Jan 2023

Well, what I did recently, when disposing of a number of old HDD's from previous PC's: I cut the soldered wiring, removed prints, removed the platters and took out the (very) strong magnetics. AFAIK they are so-called neodymium magnets. Can be used as 'magnetic pins'. Heavy lift though, somewhere around 20kg

I agree, there surely are much faster ways, but in my case I was interested to get these magnets out.

Disposal of Old External Drives-snagit-06012023-071110.png

Berton · 06 Jan 2023

Some folks hang the shiny discs in their garden to keep critters away.

mike888 · 06 Jan 2023

Original poster here.

I tried another of my Windows 7 machines and the drives work "reasonably" so I can access the pics that are the most important thing to me before disposal of the drives.

I also recently plugged a USB stick in a Windows 7 machine, and it refused to work, no error messages nothing. Other sticks are fine.

However I had the foresight to plug the problem stick into another Windows 7 machine that has not been connected to the Internet for four years and it worked fine. My next step will be to transfer those files to another USB drive that I will then use with Windows 7.

Incidentally my external drives are never used with my Windows 10 machines , the same goes for USB drives unless they have been used exclusively with Windows 10.