Hard drive eraser?

[Hannibal]

Remove the hard drive and burn it.

^^^ This ^^^^

[DerekP Houston]

Our IT department uses a sledge hammer. No joke.

One of the places I worked had what we called the "ghost busters" vault. Was a heavy degaussing device that ruined any disk. The warranty department hated it but it ensured there was nothing useful on the drive.

[David2011]

I just format them.

That is recoverable. Not secure at all.

Just take the drive out and drive a punch or old screw driver through it a couple times and you might take the memory chips out and smash them too.

No point in destroying the memory chips. Everything in memory goes away every time the computer is turned off. Memory and hard drives are very different.

[OptimusPanda]

I've always been a fan of taking them apart for the neodymium magnets inside. From there you can abuse the platters any way you like. Everything from a hammer to thermite works really well.

[JonB_in_Glencoe]

Paging Hillary Clinton...Come to the office right away...

...and bring the bleachbit

[smokeywolf]

hillary and billary's 2 favorite methods for destroying evidence are, suicide by way of three bullets to the back of the head followed by a car accident or,,, Bleachbit.

[DougGuy]

remove drives, drill a few holes OR simply locate where the drive is in the laptop and drill the whole dang thing with a drill press if you have one. Fastest simplest most effective method if they won't boot anymore.

[Traffer]

I am a Certified PC Tech. So you can rely on my advise. Question, do you want to reuse the hard drives or just make sure the info on them is destroyed?
It is simple to erase drives. The connections (unless they are quite old, like early XP or earlier models) on the hard drives are the same as the ones on your PC. You can take the hard drives out and plug them into any PC and erase them. You can use many different levels of erasure depending on how secure you want to do it. Actually just erasing it and writing over the erased drive for a while is quite secure.
If you don't care to reuse the drives...like most here have said. Bullets, hammers, etc., all work just fine to secure data so no one ever sees it again. Just make sure you mess up the disks themselves. For that matter if you take a hard drive apart and wipe it with your finger it will destroy the data.
One word of caution. A magnet will not work. I have never heard of a magnet being able to erase a hard drive from the outside of the drive. As far as I am concerned it is a myth. Probably from the old floppy drive days. Now floppies were susceptible to being destroyed by magnets as are tape drives. But hard drives? Not so much.
I ALWAYS open up hard drives and save the neodymium magnets. I have lots of them all over the place. They come in handy for lots of stuff. Hard drives are usually put together with very small torx screws. I forget the actual sizes. They have become pretty standardized to include a very very tiny size and one size bigger. You can get a cheap kit of torx drives from Wallmart for about 5 bucks that will include the right sizes.

[Wayne Smith]

I've got all the bits I'll ever need - and multiples of some! That's not the problem. Disassembly and destruction is the plan. Thanks, guys.

[mold maker]

The ram memory might be added to a newer PC and add to standard. Most have empty slots available. The HD with an external case becomes a backup memory when added to your new PC.
Just because it is dated, means only it's proven it's self. There is still value in them above scrap.

[mac60]

Let Hillary handle your hard drive destruction, she's an expert!!!

Yea, I think she uses a cloth or something.

[country gent]

Mix some tannerite up and set hard drive in it. then shoot. Should do the job

[Three44s]

Mrs. Slick Wiley and her favored Bleach Bit.

If she is not available, it is said that you can call the FBI and convince them it's a left over from the beast and they will destroy it convincingly. In the absence of Mr. Comey I would send it to Robert Mueller. He is quite loyal to the deep State and surely put it to rest at once.

Thre44s

[Lloyd Smale]

wood chipper

[sqlbullet]

There have been a mix of good answers, fun answers and bad answers here.

Practical matters:

Securely erasing a hard drive is time consuming. And for recyling, who cares if the drives are in the computer. Remove the hard drive and use it for target practice. Fun, effective.

If someone else reading this thread actually needs to retain a functioning drive, first choice would be to just replace it. A 500 GB drive is <$30 at walmart. And securely erasing a 500 GB drive will take several hours.

One comment was to just format the drive. Let me elaborate on why that is a bad idea.

Imagine for a moment that your hard drive is a big room full of file cabinets. But instead of items being placed in alphabetical order in the cabinets, the cabinets are numbered, the drawers are numbered, and the drawers are marked in 1/4" increments from left to right. When new papers need filed they are placed in the first available space where they will fit, and a paper by the door is marked showing the name of the file and the cabinet, drawer and inch increment where the file folder was placed. It was done this way so you would never had the issue of a file not fitting because the "S's" or the "R's" filled up while the "X's" are completely empty.

Formatting the drive is the equivalent of burning the paper by the door, but leaving all the stuff in the cabinet. The old files only get removed when you need to put a new file in that place, when you remove just enough of the old paper for the new file to fit. Anyone who wanted could rebuilt the index paper by just examining each folder.

Secure format options overcome this by over-writing the entire drive. However, "ghost" magnetic images can remain. Hence the existence of 3 pass and 7 pass secure erase. This is like obscuring writing on a paper by writing over it. Write enough random letters over the original letter and it eventually becomes impossible to read the original words.

For a machine going to recycle, just physically destroy the drives. Screws, gunshots, nails. Anything that physically damages the surface of the platters will do.

[MaryB]

Why I pull the platters... I always recover the magnets and taking the platter out is easy. Heat WILL destroy the magnetic pattern on them, could run a sander over the top and rough it up(the magnetic layer is very thin)... collect enough and sell them for platinum recovery!

[Hannibal]

the only actual way to destroy data on a hard drive is to take the hard drive apart, and turn the disks into a powder.

fire, magnets, do nothing.

I beg to differ. NOTHING survives fire, given that the fire is hot enough.

[OptimusPanda]

Please post the name of this magical company that can take the melted platters and make them anew.

[Traffer]

sorry but there is a company that can get data off of FLOPPY disks and Hard drives that have gone through fires. Even thermite. and even magnets.

The only real way is to turn the whole caboodle into dust, then do your melty fun. like trying to cast bullets ya know...

This is what happens when you believe everything you hear. For ALL PRACTICAL PURPOSES unless you have some really really valuable information on your hard drive that some one would spend a lot of time and energy to get at, if you want to actually reuse an old hard drive (which you probably won't because they are probably hopelessly small by current standards) all you have to do is format it and start writing over it in your home PC. After writing over it for a couple of weeks the old data will be lost. Nothing magic, Nothing spooky or CIA-ish. I have done some data recovery myself with some of the sophisticated software out there. It is very time consuming. Nobody is going to undertake doing it to see some joe-blow's family pictures or get joe's old banking statements. Platters can be removed and read from damaged hard drives. But it is very very difficult and there are not many labs in the country that even do it. Just to remove a platter from a hard disk without upsetting the data is like brain surgery. It is funny how people, corporations freak out about destroying their hard drives. When hard drives were very expensive and there was a demand for used ones companies still went to crazy lengths to have them destroyed. I had a friend that owned a computer re-use, recycling company that would offer to slice them in half with a band saw with a rep from the company watching. But nowadays with the price of hard drives, SSD's, cloud storage, etc., used hard drives are not worth reusing. They do however contain very nice magnets. And, as rotational drives are replaced by solid state drives, magnets are going to become things of the past. They will have value. Save them. They are useful. The platters are nice and shiny. They ring nicely when used as wind chimes. They can be used to scare birds off (as someone said) and they can be used as nice targets, visible for long distances. I save them for a woman in my family who makes mobiles and wind chimes out of them.

[Traffer]

Why I pull the platters... I always recover the magnets and taking the platter out is easy. Heat WILL destroy the magnetic pattern on them, could run a sander over the top and rough it up(the magnetic layer is very thin)... collect enough and sell them for platinum recovery!

I looked it up, there is about 10 cents worth of platinum on a typical hard drive.