1. One method is shredding. You must disassemble the drive, take the platters, and run them through a shredder.
2. The other method is to use powerful magnets. This is typically done with specialized machinery that can be quite costly. If you have had several dives, the degaussing method is the fastest of the two options.
3. Another method is to use pulverizing, in which a machine crushes the drive to destroy all components, making the data unrecoverable.
If the plan is to repurpose the drives, the best method is to employ a disk wiping/overwriting program. It is better to use a program that writes random patterns of ones and zeroes. Even if all you use is the zero-filling approach, specialized tools can still recover data. Wiping is also known as purging.
Formatting will not help with wiping data. All it does is remove the reference to the data.
Solid State Drives sometimes come with a built-in data sanitization tool. Degaussing will not work on SSDs.
It is best to use a cross-cut shredder. Some of these devices are rated according to the size of the cut they make.
Another method is that some high-security organizations add water to the paper after it has been shredded. This displaces the ink, and it is known as "Pulling."
You can also burn paper documents. We did this in the military. Since the information we had was considered Top Secret, we burned the paper in an incinerator with a screen at the top to keep the ashes from floating off. Then, we pulverized the ashes.
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