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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

> Hard drives are a risk since I don't want to toss due to not know what is on it (Bitcoin?) or have my personal data stolen, or just something I may miss copying from it.

Today you can buy a 20T drive for under $300. You can copy all your old drives to it, and then get rid of the old drives. As for stolen data, you can:

1. put it on a drill press and run a 3/8 drill through the platter

2. put your safety glasses on and give it a mighty blow from a sledgehammer

I suppose the NSA, at great expense and effort, might still be able to retrieve a few bytes from it, but even they aren't that desperate for your copy of Oregon Trail.

BTW, I'm a hoarder myself and understand the problem.

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I recommend disassembling hard disks and keeping the magnets, they're super useful to have to capture loose screws and the like. Glue one to the end of a stick or telescoping pointer and you have a way to retrieve magnetic things that fall behind furniture.

You could also literally wipe your data by using a little sandpaper on the platters if you really wanted to.

Is there a way to reliably scrub the drives to make sure they're reusable? I know storage is cheap but it's destroying the drive really the only way to ensure data integrity?

I'm a big fan of recycling old electronics wherever possible. Would the cost of compute to virtually destroy the data on the drive so it can be safely reused as storage exceed the cost of physically destroying the drive and then recycling the raw materials?

I know for some cases true destruction is the best way to mitigate data theft in this case but... That's a bit heavy handed for an 80% use case, innit?

Edit: personally I always check what's on my old drives before decomming them but I think I'm an outlier here

Nuke it.

8 times rewrite.

"She's dead, Jim." No kill like overkill!

Just overwriting once with all zeroes (or anything else) is enough; for modern drives (where “modern” means “last 25 years”). It’s basically impossible to recover data after that.

That's what I figured- I've never actually tested it though because I don't have any spare drives sitting around anymore.

One of these days though I'll get around to zeroing out a drive and then running Autopsy on it for shiggles just to see what comes back up. Should be a fun experience!

> or anything else

I recommend overwriting with an endless loop of the freeway scene from "Solaris".

i would have gone with meatspin or ytmnd but to each their own

>1. put it on a drill press and run a 3/8 drill through the platter

I briefly worked IT for a federal police agency and that is what they did.

I don't think I'll do that though plus I don't have a metal bit sharp enough. I'd research how to sharpen a metal bit on a grinder. Get sidetracked and look up how to harden metal bits. Then metallurgy and different metal and what exactly is hardening how does it change the crystal structure. Is metal actually a crystal? and so on....

> I don't think I'll do that though plus I don't have a metal bit sharp enough.

You don't need a special bit for this. Most of a hard drive is made of soft aluminum; a standard drill bit will go right through it.

Dissolving in acid seems like the safest/most overkill option: <https://youtu.be/L0bcNm1gfpU>.

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