Format or destroy old hard drives?

[bentley45]

I have de-commissioned about a dozen servers over the past year and right now they are just stacked against the wall. I can surplus them at my company's auction, but I would rather destroy the harddrives than low-level format them and release them to the public.
What are my options as far as destroying the drives (I have a big hammer) or formatting them to the point I would be comfortable selling them?
Thanks!

 

[LawnBoy]

I've had a lot of fun dismantling them and passing out the platters for people to use as coasters.

 

[jkupski]

I'm a big fan of introducing hard drives to a 100 ton press. If you can recover data off of it after that, you're welcome to it.

 

[xxzab]

There is software you can get that you boot up a floppy/cd to turn your drive back to all zero's. They seem to work well.

Eric
Whirlpool Corp.

 

[AndrewTait]

I normally use the big hammer approach - at the end of the day, if the servers are so old that you are decommisioning them, then the chances are the disks are too small to be useful.

If they are of a useful size, then you should be keeping them as spares!

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So often times it happens that we live our lives in chains
And we never even know we have the key

Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum
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[MadBandit]

if tools such as Killdisk do not do the job to your satisfaction, the other option to the press or a hammer is always a drill...

very rewarding!

 

[ArizonaGeek]

I use KillDisk and use their strongest format which is the Gutmann wipe. That should be more than enough for most servers. That is what we use for our servers and desktops we've sold.

If you are doing government work or something so sensitive that it just cant be released, the big hammer approach works good, the big drill works better. You need to destroy the plates inside otherwise data can potentially still be found on them.

Cheers
Rob