Throwing away an old hard drive?
Stroke the exposed circuit board with a pp3 battery, and then sweep around the casing with one of those really powerful rare-earth magnets. This will prevent people from finding your bank details, old emails, plans for terrorist attacks and your collection of donkey-induced snuff movies.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Wed 23 Mar 2011, 17:08, 12 replies, latest was 14 years ago)

or just drill a hole in it.
And if you can't be arsed doing that and it'll still spin up, download ccleaner and wipe the drive a few times with a defrag in-between each one, good luck to anyone trying to get anything off that.
(Kip, Wed 23 Mar 2011, 19:16, Reply)

I just smuggle mine into MRI scanners, simple.

( Ring Of Fire A petty, drooling belming butthurt retard., Wed 23 Mar 2011, 21:07, Reply)

If the drive still works, but simply needs disposing of
Use DBAN or the Linux 'wipe' command from a LiveCD

If it's broken the only totally accepted way is to melt all the platters into a lump, and burn the PCB.

NB: The above is only really needed for the really unforgivable porn or disks containing people's details and such. But if it's at work there's plenty of places you can hire a degausser.
( Cadmus has teh uplikn coeds at, Wed 23 Mar 2011, 23:29, Reply)

how about
just smashing it to fuck with a hammer?
Where the fuck am I supposed to get 'one of those really powerful rare earth magnets' from?
The superhero weapon shop? Maybe I'll pick up a baterang and some kryptonite while I'm there.
(bunglist, Thu 24 Mar 2011, 8:13, Reply)

you need to understand
that I actually do all this stuff
(bunglist, Thu 24 Mar 2011, 8:15, Reply)

and 'smashing it to fuck'
is sooo therapeutic.
Just don't do it in your office which just happens to be above a lecture theatre.
(GingerIrishTosser isn't dead yet., Thu 24 Mar 2011, 12:34, Reply)

rare earth magnets
are made from neodymium. I got one off ebay for about £2.50 and it's about the size of a 10p coin, but slightly thicker.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Thu 24 Mar 2011, 15:14, Reply)

There are two of them in most harddrives too.

( speedyballbangpots, Thu 24 Mar 2011, 15:36, Reply)

which you retrieve by
smashing it to fuck with a hammer
(bblgoose, Wed 13 Apr 2011, 17:15, Reply)

I half buried one
in the freshly laid concrete of some new houses.
Just left one corner peeking out about an inch or so.

Never revisited to see what they had done with it.
(GingerIrishTosser isn't dead yet., Thu 24 Mar 2011, 12:38, Reply)

I wanna visit rare-earth!

( scarpe We Stole Bikes, Thu 24 Mar 2011, 13:08, Reply)

Not sure the magnets will work.
They ought to, I suppose, but given the inverse cube law they may not get close enought to wipe the drive.
The battery may well kill the controller -- but there are plenty of people who can move the platters to another enclosure.
Personally, I'd either overwrite in a DOD-type manner and/or destroy the drive.
(Me, I'm not... in any way intoxicated, Thu 24 Mar 2011, 19:06, Reply)