My wife is always complaining because she wants me to get rid of my museum of old PC parts and cords. Every time I want to throw them away, I know I will need one of those parts the next day. After months of procrastinating, I had a garage sale and pretty much gave all my peripherals away. The one item you never want to give away is a hard drive. Good hackers can retrieve data even from a hard drive that has been formatted.

A couple of years ago my colleague and I were looking for some spare parts. We found a PC that seemed in good condition that seemed to have been owned an Attorney that did trusts and estates. I was hoping to grab some drivers (software that configures the PC for attached hardware), and when I turned it on, I discovered there were no passwords and it was in perfect working condition.  The previous owner had all kinds of information on that drive that should not have been made public. So we formatted the drive in an advanced method that zeroes out all of the data.

Here are some simple tips of disposing your hard drive properly.

Hard drives are connected to the motherboard inside your desktop machines

I would recommend hiring an IT professional to remove the hard drives, though it’s not as difficult to do as one may think. Dells come with a carriage that can be easily removed. But taking a sledge hammer to a PC could be dangerous. I once observed some teenagers taking a hammer to break up a hard drive and I was a little upset because I felt they risked injury doing so.

There are some companies that will grind hard drives into little pieces. I feel this is a bit extreme but they do exist. The Geek Squad has a great you tube video: http://youtu.be/dYcPT-xrLBM  or Email [email protected] subject line: ‘Disposing of your hard drive,’ and I will send you the link.

YouTube is a Computer Tech’s best friend. It’s a shame that most people don’t use it for finding good and helpful information—after all, how many kittens-doing-tricks videos can you view? Computer techs refer to YouTube on a regular basis.

The size of a hard drive—even large ones—is about the size of the palm of your hand. I would get a shoe box and write ‘old hard drives’ on the box. Label each hard drive with the dates and a hint of the contents with a Sharpie pen in case you need to retrieve data later. Or you can repurpose it.

For under $20 you can buy an External Hard drive kit. They are really simple to use. Take note the difference between an IDE drive and a SATA drive. IDE will have a bunch of pins sticking out of it. SATA will have two modules with no pins.  They can both leave the data on the drive in the external kit. This can be helpful if you want to retrieve or copy from an old drive at a later time. Or you can format the hard drive and use the external drive for data storage.

It makes sense to keep all your old hard drives somewhere in your home. But if you feel you must dispose of the drive, please don’t leave your computer on the curb if it still has the hard drive in it. Take the time to remove the hard drive or call your IT professional.

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By Shneur Garb