In general, you can't really scrub a hard drive. No company in their right mind should ever let an old computer go out the door with a hard drive in it. Hard drives should be destroyed. I recommend something like this: [this video]
When you've got hundreds or thousands of drives to destroy it's not worth the man hours or consumables to cut them or drill holes in them. Even shooting them gets old quickly. When I worked for a defense contractor we started one of our daily infosec briefings with a video of one of our shipyards destroying a few hundred hard drives. They put them all in a shipyard size press brake. The end result was very long line of C shaped hard drives. Anyone who deals with enough drives and doesn't have other business (like a shipyard) that they can borrow suitable equipment from will likely wind up buying an industrial shredder.[1] [1] [this video]
Industrial shredder example for bulk drive destruction
If they are spinning rust, then a drilled hole is sufficient against most forms of data recovery. A plastic syringe full of CLR Calcium Lime Rust remover injected into the drilled hole will finish the job. If money is not a factor then it's a lot easier and faster to take them to a shredding service. [1][2] Shredding disks regardless of spinning rust or SSD will make data recovery nearly impossible. [1] - [this video] [2] - [link]
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed
3 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Read more