crazyscot

This, ladies, gents and other gentlebeings, is a good demonstration of why, if you must apply brute force and ignorance to a discarded hard drive to ensure your data is unreadable, WEAR EYE PROTECTION. (Before you ask, yes I was.)

This is (was) a laptop hard drive of 2004 vintage; the platters turned out to be extremely fragile, much more so than the desktop drives I've previously mangled. This is what happened when I applied not very much force to try and prise it off the spindle; the second one let go almost explosively when I gripped it firmly in a pair of pliers.

Oh well; job done, at least! Now, excuse me while I go sweep up the fragments...