I've got a number of older hard drives I'd like to destroy to the point where ordinary effort by someone like me makes them unreadable. I tried drilling a hole through one of them, and it worked, but it was surprisingly hard to do, the hard drive case is I guess fairly hard steel.
I'm thinking I should probably do encrypted drives from now on. The time cost to wipe drives by writing random data is in the hours and hours now.
Everything I've read about "giant magnet" suggests it really has to be GIANT. Some literal demagnetizing tools for things like audio tape or wrenches or whatever have been used on hard drives to no good effect. I have a drill press but yeah I think it needs quality bits, and you have to do pilot holes at smaller diameter and then bigger hole.
one I've seen is to shoot a hardened concrete nail through it with a powder driven nail driver. Kinda works.
Opening it up and removing platters is annoying as hell and takes way too long and requires special screw drivers. This really needs like a double-rollers to crush the case open and slide into an oven at 2000F for a half hour or something.
Daniel Lakeland
Jessamyn