Hardware recycling question: what do you do with harddrives?

[shadewalker]

I use a DoD software wipe then drill a bunch of holes through the platters / drives with a drill press( a hand drill would do the trick too). For good measure I make sure the connectors and any circuit boards are in a non functioning state before tossing them as well just in case.

At my work we used to just take them to a 30 ton press. That made awfully quick work of them

[Chivalrous]

Thanks guys! Yeah ill start wiping them. Better safe than sorry. Then maybe a little skeet shooting!

[flux1]

I usually keep my old drives as the average number of them that has died to the number owned is far higher than any of my other hardware. Old ones I usually wipe with a program like Kill Disk or TrueCrypt with a random password to write random crap over the drive, then pack it away in the closet.

[luxlunae]

Thanks guys, I'll ask the people at best buy if they actually do hard drive shredding and if not... well the closet is probably as safe a place as any.

[tldr]

Best Buy is *not* a company whose employees I would trust to safeguard my data.

[moosejaw]

Companies like Iron Mountain that do secure file storage and secure document destruction will also have shredders that can do hard drives.

[shadewalker]

Best Buy is *not* a company whose employees I would trust to safeguard my data.

I agree 100%

[Ualaa]

I generally recycle them, as in... pass older systems on to relatives.
In general, my 3-5 year old gaming system is a lot stronger than whatever most non-gaming people happen to have.

[JohnGabriel]

I generally recycle them, as in... pass older systems on to relatives.
In general, my 3-5 year old gaming system is a lot stronger than whatever most non-gaming people happen to have.

Hopefully reinstalling Windows from scratch with a full format wipes it well enough. Because that is what I do to mine before giving old computers to family to use.

[MiRai]

Hopefully reinstalling Windows from scratch with a full format wipes it well enough. Because that is what I do to mine before giving old computers to family to use.

Probably not, but it's only a problem if they're using special software to dig up archaic stuff on the drive... and then they'd need to care enough about any material they did find... and then...

Well, what are you so worried about?