[Gllug] Securely disposing of old hard drives

[Chris Bell]

On Mon 20 Aug, Richard Jones wrote:
> 
> I've got a stack of old / obsolete hard drives.  Suggestions as to how
> to get rid of them securely?
> 
> I'm not worried about MI5 / govt agency security, but I would like to
> prevent some casual thief fishing one out of the bin and grepping for
> passwords and bank account details.
> 
> My best idea so far was to dismantle them, but there are quite a lot
> (about 20) so this would be time-consuming ...  Another thought was
> that soaking them in water ought to be enough to damage the
> electronics sufficiently to stop them from just working.
> 
> Rich.
> 
   I happily receive old secondhand drives, put them in a test box, use
Linux fdisk or cfdisk to delete any old partitions and create a single huge
partition, then run mke2fs -c -c which thoroughly checks every bit of
storage space by repeatedly writing to, and then reading from, every part of
the disc.
   Some discs are seen to be total write-offs, others are re-used. It does
take time, but I am happy to just leave it running until it is completed.

-- 
Chris Bell

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