I had a collection of old drives from 1996 to 2006, some IDE, but mostly SCSI/SCA, and didn't want to take the time to wipe all of them. I also didn't want to painstakingly disassemble the tiny torx screws to get at the platters, and instead opted for brute force physical destruction. First I removed all the circuit boards and threw them into the computer recycling pile.
I remembered Simson Garfinkel's paper on private data recovered from discarded hard drives as I was whacking them good with a maul, normally used for splitting logs but it did a respectable job on hard drive. I wore eye protection and steel-toed boots for protection from flying hard drive bits, and from myself.
At this point a normal person would call it a day. But I've been working in security and fraud detection for over a decade, and also happen to have a garage of metal working tools of various types. I remembered Peter Gutmann's presentation at the 2001 or 2002 Usenix Security Symposium, and some articles on identity theft cases tied to discarded hard drives, and decided further measures were called for.
So I chopped them into pieces with a metal cutting band saw. I tried to get at the platters which are soft chewy aluminum that the bansdaw races through, and avoid the hub which is hard steel. I wore a particulate respirator while chopping the mangled drives into smaller bits
IBM drives were the worst, they had steel inserts built into their cases on the top and bottom. It just took longer, and in some cases I laid them flat on the bandsaw and just went through the top and platters. In in the end, they all succumbed. It almost looks like art.
