Many times simply throwing away a hard drive is not a viable option. Businesses might have extremely sensitive information on them such as credit card information, employee documents, trade secrets and more. Even private consumers often have tax information, passwords, and other stuff you wouldn’t want to chance being exposed. In these situations, it’s essential to find an easy and effective method for destroying the data that your hard drive contains – permanently.
Shredding
If you work for a business and have to destroy hard drives in bulk, shredding is the best solution. Hard drive shredding works a lot like paper shredding, except on a far more powerful scale. Usually you take a batch of drives to a company who has an industrial shredder. They will completely destroy the hard drive and turn them into pieces, thus ruining whatever sensitive information they have on them. These services are typically used for governments, or large corporations who frequently have to destroy multiple drives.
Zero filling
When data on a hard drive is “deleted”, it doesn’t really go anywhere. The drive merely takes away the path to that file, but leaves that file in place. Eventually, when the space is needed, that file will be overwritten with a new file. Zero filling works by expediting that process and fills the entire drive with random data until everything is overwritten. It’s still technically possible to find fragments of your data after this is done, which is why programs like Dban exist. Dban is a boot disk that will allow you to pick from a variety of overwriting options, one of which allows you to overwrite your hard drive 28 times with random data. This method is more than sufficient for totally destroying data, and unlike the other two methods, the hard drive is still usable and can be donated.
Brute force
When you don’t have the time or money for the other two options, there’s always brute force. All of the hard drives data is stored on the platter, which can be easily taken out and accessed by unscrewing a few screws. After it’s removed, simply take it out and break it a few times with a hammer. Sure it’s crude, but it’s free, and very effective.