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.

anyway, anyone have a favorite safe and relatively quick way to destroy 3.5 inch hard drives?
Also, is there an easy linux scheme where you have a small partition with the encryption keys and the rest of the partitions are encrypted, and the system can boot without someone at the keyboard to type a password, but you can render the drive useless by overwriting random data on the 10MB key partition or whatever? I'm sure this is doable, but is there a system that makes it easy?
I mostly know about LUKS, but what I know requires you to type a passphrase on boot. so I want something that doesn't do that so when power goes out and my machine reboots on its own it boots up using the stored key, and then I can easily wipe the key if desired.
Full-Disk Encryption With cryptsetup/LUKS - Nitrokey Documentation