Chosen Solution
I have a small stack of dead hard drives I’d like to have shredded. I’ve found a few places online that provide that service, but the best quote I got was $10 a drive. I’m curious if anyone has any recommendation of anyone who provides the same service for a cheaper price. (And I know I could just drill some holes in the drives, which is what I may end up doing, but I like the idea of total information destruction that shredding provides and I like the idea that they’ll recycle the remains properly afterwards.)
I agree with MacHead – do it yourself in order to make sure it’s been done. Always be wary of recyclers that claim they will erase your data, because most don’t bother (believe me, I buy hundreds of laptops a year from recyclers and on a daily basis I come across personal data that should have been deleted). Another option is to use Disk Utility’s “security options” under the erase tab to do a full write on the drive after formatting. I am not a shredding expert and I am not aware of how this compares to a 3rd party tool that does shredding, but Disk Utility with these settings turned on basically writes to the disk for a matter of hours, so it’s hard to believe there would be much left afterward. And using this method you’d still have a usable drive afterward.
Drill your holes (or smack with a hammer) and take it to your local hazmat recycle site. N.
Smack it with a hammer, but that’s pointless, because 7 pass is what the DoD recommends, and Mac OS X let’s you go all the way to 35-pass. More than enough. However, another fun way is to take them apart with a star screwdriver.
While you can drill your holes and hit it with a hammer and the damage will be sufficient, shooting it may inflict better damage. Obligatory warning: This is option is DANGEROUS if you do not take the proper precautions. To avoid issues, take the drive to a large acre of land or a open shooting range to avoid creating an accidental danger point that can contain anything you shoot the drive with safely. This can be a problem in areas with a moderate amount of foot traffic. If you’re under 18, take the hard drive to the range and do this while you are under adult supervision or have someone else do it for you. The first thing you should do is drill your holes and smash the drive with a hammer. Once you do that and decide you want to inflict further damage, then I would go ahead and shoot the hard drive. The key thing here is making sure the gun type and ammo gauge will do a good amount of damage to the drive. I’d suggest looking into a .12 gauge shotgun for this, since it will do a fair bit of damage to the drive. Ideally, this is what the drive should look like when you are done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pZD99lT… Obligatory gun safety advice: Guns are not toys. If you are not sure if it is loaded, assume that it is.Take the drive to a place with lots of open land or a shooting range.Wear eye protection.Make sure everyone around you knows to keep a safe distance from you.Make sure the slug can land somewhere it is not a risk to anyone in the area.Follow your local laws. Gun safety should be your #1 thing if you actually decide to shoot the hard drive to make sure the data is beyond data recovery. If you know this that’s great but I need to put it here just in case someone who has little time around guns sees this answer and decides to shoot their old hard drive before they dispose of it. Destruction without shooting the drive If you are not comfortable around guns or think that shooting the drive is extreme, you don’t need to go that route to destroy the drive. If you would rather drill your holes and smash the casing, this is often sufficient for the average person disposing of an old hard drive. It also doesn’t hurt to destroy the PCB just to be sure that data recovery is not worth the effort. All you really need to do with the PCB is smash the chips and interface and this should be sufficient to make the PCB unusable.
just burn it
In support of ifixit mind-set, though, it would sure seem preferable to WIPE your drives with an appropriate utility (DBAN (http://www.dban.org/) comes to mind), and then donate them to a re-use center, who could very well have great need for your drives. I know that doesn’t answer your specific question (which is over 2 yrs old anyway at this point), but felt that the wipe-and-donate option should be mentioned here, at the very least.
Take the drives apart save the pcb and magnets optionally the bearings and put platters in an industrial furnace. The memory chips if present can be removed and fragmented. Ideally make visual record of operation showing each drive casing and serial numbers and also store this in a database. Drive casings can be recycled as high grade Al and motors + bearings have valuable copper.
Incidentally I found that older drive PCBs have value for data recovery companies, removing and shredding just the 8 pin flash chip is good enough. These can also be recycled if destruction of the data on them can be assured they were previously wiped. Newer hybrid drives are a problem as data can be stored on the PCB as well though this is normally obvious upon removal.
