Disposal of Old External Drives

Hello @mike888,

Drill as many holes as you can, just put them in a vice and drill.

I hope this helps.

16-pound sledge hammer would work.

Berton said:

16-pound sledge hammer would work.

Some other possible solutions off the top of my head:

1) Buy a plane ticket to somewhere with active volcano, climb up volcano - drop it into active lava bed

2) Put it on a probe being sent into sun

3) Put it in a sulphuric acid vat

4) put it on a nuclear bomb test site

5) put content on youtube - you will make so much money out of advertising, you will not care. Your offended family will soon love you again.

6) send it through a timewarp so it reappears after your death - after that you will not care.

7) Send it in luggage to Charles De Gaulle airport with false labelling - once luggage is lost there it is never seen again

8) Put in liquid hydrogen and make it very brittle and it will shatter easily with a hammer

9) let my ex-wife have the drives - she has an uncanny ability to lose all data so it is never recovered, just by being within 10 metres of drive

I am sure others can provide innovative methods?

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 ?

Yes, a regular 1/4" steel twist drill bit is adequate. You only need one hole and a vise will help hold it steady. Anything more is overkill. If you live in a metropolitan area some recyclers will allow you to watch them shred the drive.

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