I have a couple of old laptops lying around and want to throw them away, but have been cautious to do so because of privacy concerns of data still on the hard drives. What is the best way to wipe them? Or should I take them out and physically destroy them?
They are running windows vista and 10 I think.
Since no one mentioned it: VCR tape eraser.
Basically just an electromagnet that oscillates because it’s running directly from AC current.
With an extension cord you could erase all the hard drives in a computer lab just waving the eraser vaguely where the drives are.
Physical destruction is better though.
That doesn’t work for SSDs though.
Unfortunately the degausing trick doesn’t work that well with newer higher capacity harddrives. As capacity increases they actually need to be less sensitive to magnetic fields to prevent multiple bits flipping when the drive head tries to write data. With modern multiterabyte harddrives you’re going to have a hard time reliably wiping the platters with anything short of an MRI magnetic field. That’s not to say smaller magnetic fields like degausing coils can’t be damaging; they will just take a long time to destroy enough of the data to prevent recovery. You’re actually more likely to break the drive heads with a degausing coil than you are to wipe the platters.
Well now have we found our answer? We just need to bribe an orderly?