[Gllug] Securely disposing of old hard drives

[M.Blackmore]

Boot and nuke off a floppy disk, shreds data totally, then donate them
to one of the recycling schemes or a freecycle. Small disks are still
useful for thin clients etc. in "3rd world" as old disks die much more
often than old computers they are in.

No way even MI5 will pull anything off boot and nuked disk apparently,
or so we are led to believe.

Or offer them up on a local freecycle (look out on the web for your
local one). I've successfully disposed of heaps of obsolete kit to
people on freecycle who have been glad to have it (for many people even
a 1 or 2gb disk is quite enough for their purposes when their old one
expires, we forget just how basic are many people's computing needs with
no point in upgrading to anything more, and often little spare cash to
go onto the upgrade treadmill anyway - quite a few old computers have
been donated loaded with a "light" linux and no one has noticed really
given that all they want is email, basic web browsing, and a word
processor).

Anyway, don't just wreck them. Waste when someone can find them useful -
I've been consistently amazed at what gets snapped up on freecycle!

On Mon, 2007-08-20 at 09:39 +0100, 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.
> 
> -- 
> Richard Jones
> Red Hat

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