After dealing with Ginny’s older computer, I took stock of the various bits & pieces of computer hardware that I have lying around.
I noticed that there were a fair number of unused hard drives. Some were defective and out of warranty others were so small as to be next to useless.
I decided to get rid of them. But I don’t want to run the risk of someone being able to recover anything from the disks. A bit of research, and a post to the PCTECH list, determined that the best way to destroy the drives would be to drill holes through the platters (although shooting the drives was pretty darn tempting).
After charging up the batteries for my cordless drill (and determining that at least one of the batteries is probably dead itself) I put nice neat holes in the platters of them all.
Now all I have to do is find a place to safely get rid of them. As it happens, Hoffman Estates is having a recycling event next weekend where they will accept electronics (and paint, old prescription medication, etc).
You don’t have a trash can?
Some electronic components contain material that need to be disposed of in special ways. The EPA has information on this.
For disk drives, I usually run a few runs of a disk wiper if I’m giving them away (DBAN for example). Otherwise I strip the platters out, they’re pretty cool 🙂
Jon: Yes, in most cases I do that too … but some of these drives were defective … although someone who really wanted to might be able to extract some information. I figure destroying the platters reduces that possibility.
It was nice meeting you on Twitter, David.
What in the heck was on those drives that you didn’t want people getting at???