Re: What do you do with your personal home dead/broken storage drives (e.g., old HDDs) that you want to get rid of?

Jolly Roger <[email protected]> wrote:

> Ant <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> What do you do with your personal home dead/broken storage drives (e.g., 
>> old HDDs) that you want to get rid of? Do you physically destroy them at 
>> home and toss the pieces into trash? Go to a place that have drive 
>> shredders (can't find many around my location)?
> 
> There's a local non-profit company here that takes hard drives and
> destroys them for you. If they are operational, they securely sanitize
> them, overwriting all data multiple times and then repurpose them for
> free or low cost to the community. If not, they physically destroy
> (shred) and recycle them.

Some cities have shredding events, and include drives (HDD, SSD, USB).
These are events, so you have to wait until the next one.  Considering
how easy HDDs can be dismantled, I wouldn't bother waiting.  Plus, as
Char mentions, you get a plus on the strong magnets inside.  Nice to
have something than nothing.  Plus the platters can be used as shiny
coasters.