Wiping Old Hard Disks

[teeitup]

Well for 2008 I'm getting rid of old hardware stashes.
This new "green" mentality makes it much easier to discard old hardware than in the past.

It's amazing how many hard disks I have lying around.

Of course I want to erase, wipe, delete or what ever you call it.

Any recommendations and or experiences would be appreciated.

[retsaw]

I guess you don't read Slashdot, the same question was asked there a few days ago.

[mrrangerman43]

Well if the drives are small (data size) under 10GB there are companies that will shred them. I take a 32oz. claw hammer and see if I can drive it through them. (Helps to release any built up anger ) Then if you have a recycling center that buys scrap metal you can take them there and get a little money.

If they're 10GB or over wipe them then sell em on ebay.

[JayMan8081]

You can also check out this article. I typically go with mrrangerman43 though if I don't need the drive. Nothing is more tension relieving than destroying an old, unwanted hard drive.

[ph34r]

I find that old drives make great gong targets on the 200 yard rifle range...

[happybunny]

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

[bwkaz]

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Good, somebody beat me to it.

At work we use Autoclave, an old (i.e. kernel-2.4) floppy-disk-based disk-nuke program. But it isn't being developed anymore; the author points people to Darik's Boot and Nuke instead. We haven't tried it at work yet, but I've used it on a few drives at home, and it works OK.

[teeitup]

I've decided to use wipe.

I'm putting the old drives in a external usb enclosure and then running Wipe from my PC.

Disks that will not spin-up will be smashed.

I've used DBAN in the past when donating PCs from work. Very effective in wiping out the disk in a workstation.

A gun might be the most fun but the local gun club wouldn't approve.

Thanks All