SH wrote:
Whenever I wish to sell on of a hard disc, I *always* do a secure
overwrite using a variety of software tools, such as DBAN (Darik's Boot
'n' Nuke)and it gets securely erased to DoD standards..... before it
leaves my hands..... So my personal and financial data does not get
exploited by ne-er do wells....

I had 2 off 40 GB and 2 off 500 GB hard discs that either had the click
of death or was not "present" in the BIOS attached drives autodetection
list.

Just bend the platters in a bench vice.
Cutting is not necessary.

An MFM (magnetic force microscopy) cannot follow
the surface if it isn't flat.

The platters, if bent, will never ever ever be
smooth enough at any future date, to be rotating
on a spindle. They would smash the heads to hell
and back. They have to be flat to an extremely
tight tolerance, and once they're bent, no amount
of hammering and fussing, will make them flat again.

Just bend them.

The government here, uses a chipper. There is no degausser
certified to destroy the bits stored on the platter, so
physical destruction is the preferred method, and there
is a chipper with hardened blades that they use. And
at a guess, with frequent blade/disc changes.

On certain high tech drives (6TB, with 256MB or larger cache),
there is a flash chip which stored the cache data if the
power goes off suddenly. For those disks, the flash chip
must be shredded (for high security applications). There
are also drives which had flash-cache, 8GB of SLC used
for caching, and the same recommendation there, the 8GB of
SLC should be shredded. Not every PCB is devoid of
user data, most are, but there are exceptions. The ones
with Flash Cache might have been called "FireCuda".

Paul