If the goal is for the media never to be reused, there are three methods (for mechanical drives, not solid-state)
1. One method is shredding. You would need to disassemble the drive and take the platters and run them through a shredder.
2. The other method is to use powerful magnets, this is typically done with a piece of specialized machinery that can be quite costly. If you had several dives, the degaussing method is the fastest of the two options.
3. Another method is to use pulverizing where a machine crushes the drive to destroy all components and the data is 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. There are specialized tools that can still recover data if all you use is the zero-filling approach. 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 SSD's.
Best to use a cross-cut shredder. Some of these devices are rated down to the size of the cut it makes.
Another method is that some high-security organizations will add water to the paper after it has been shredded. This displaces the ink. This is known as "Pulping."
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 that had a screen at the top to keep the ashes from floating off. Then we pulverized the ashes.
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