On Fri, 10 Aug 2012 18:59:17 +0200, "Linea Recta"
wrote:

Now for another little problem: privacy. I tried to open up the broken
drives yesterday, in an attempt to phisically damage the plates with a
screwdriver. One of them couldn't be opened because the screws had
triangular holes in stead of Philips cross. The next best thing I could
think of was to drop the drives from 2 metres heigh on a concrete floor. I
assume this rendered them useless before putting them in the waste bin...

You might be surprised at how ineffective dropping can be, at least
with regards to the platters.

When I was in the military, we had a large-ish machine that looked
like a paper shredder on steroids. You could drop a hard drive into it
and it would spit out fingernail-sized pieces of metal. We mostly used
it to grind up classified documents, up to about 4 inches thick.
Before we got that machine, we would destroy hard drives with a
5-pound sledge hammer.