What is the easiest way to.....

[ScriptOhio]

destroy a hard drive?

I cleaned out a closet and trashed my three old PCs. However, before doing so I took out the hard drives, because they had personnal information on them. Good thing that I did; since a couple hours after I put them on the curb for trash pickup someone came by and took them.

Now I have three hard drives that I want to trash. The Western Digital hard drives are pretty solid. Hitting them with a hammer barey dents them.What is the easiest way to make them unreadable?

thanks

[BUCKYLE]

Get a bigger hammer...or, swing like a man.

[scooter1369]

Hand it to a 4 year old. Dead in minutes.

[Taosman]

Hard drives are not easily destroyed. Sure, you can remove one easily enough. But, to totally destroy one does take some serious work with a hammer(bigger the better).
Pull the hard drive and store it.

[jwinslow]

YouTube - Hard drive in microwave

[Dryden]

Three sure-fire ways to wipe a drive:

1: If you want to save the drive, buy an eRazer.
PC Connection - Drive eRazer for 3.5" IDE PATA Hard Drives- Standard Model

2: If you want to physically trash the drive, take the cover off and expose the platter to ambient air. Once you contaminate the platters with dust/debris, the drive is unusable. At 5400RPM and higher, a little piece of dust will tear the drive up if someone attempts to put it back together and run it. Once disassembled, you have lots of options: such as whacking it with a bat, a hammer, or drilling holes through the platters.

3: Install XP, IE6 and no virus checker/spyware blocker and let my 7 year old son surf the Web.