Cautionary note

[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...

Comments

[pseudomonas]

Next time put the whole lot in a heavy sack and apply a hammer?

[crazyscot]

I always take the platters out first so as to be able to apply maximal brute force to them. I hadn't even got that far this time...

[pseudomonas]

With a big enough hammer, I'm sure you could arrange for things to work.

[tigerfort]

Wow; I've never seen one do that before. I wonder what the platters for laptop drives are made from (other than, apparently, not the same stuff used in desktop ones).