"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...
On 23/12/12 13:24, Tim Streater wrote:
In article
,
"Man at B&Q" wrote:

On Dec 22, 5:20 pm, wrote:
charles wrote:
In article ,
tony sayer wrote:

OK .. there is an outfit round here who has a hard drive
"mincer" it
does just that . His firm collects PC's takes the hard drives
out and
puts them in a machine that literally minces them into small
chunks!..

We once tried to wreck some hard drives but hitting them with a
hammer
and throwing them at the floor not dropping them, throwing them.
It was
very surprising just how robust they were even with that
treatment.

when I took the hard drive out of a desktop machine I then undid
some
screws and removed the cover and then the disk. It can be bent by
putting
it in vice and htting it witha hammer. Some of the coating flakes
off, too.

cheaper than paying someone to use a 'mincer'.

I really have never fathomed out why people are so paranoid about
what's left on their disk drives. The same stuff is almost certainly
spread all around the internet anyway and a proper low level format
will erase sufficiently that no one except MI5/MI6 will have the time,
money and equipment to get any data off the drive.

Same reason they are so paranoid about viruses. The media make the
problem appear much worse than it really is.

People *should* be concerned not to give away a drive that might contain
passwords, CC numbers, names and addresses, etc.

Rather than a low-level format, writing zeroes all over the drive (Disk
Utility will do that for you) is a better bet.

and bang goes Windows, and all the resale value.

Not if you have enough of a clue to be able to reinstall
Win again after you have zeroed the drive using the
same number that was installed there in the first place.

Or if you have the ability to reinstall that's only about 10 hours per
machine

Doesnt take anything like that long and the bulk of
the time taken you can be doing other systems anyway.

- bang goes any resale profit.

Fraid not.

One option is to strip the disks, crush them,

Thats completely pointless compared with just zeroing the contents.

and replace and reinstall Linux of course.

If you can still get suitable disks..

You dont have to if you arent stupid enough to crush them in the first
place.