eDay

Today is eDay in New Zealand. Mum's been wanting to get rid of all the computers we've accumulated over the years (mostly ones dad brings home from work) for a while, but most places charge. Two years ago, Dell trialled a computer collection day where people could drop off their old computers for free. It was such a success that they made it an annual event. Unfortunately, I've always learnt about the collections day after the collection day.

Anyways, a few months ago I decided to find out when the next collection date was and discovered it wasn't too far off, so we were prepared this time. Well, almost.

A little after I bought my external hard drive, I wanted to see if I could get the hard drive out of our last computer because there was still some pretty recent data in there. So I managed to get my hands on a disassembly manual and an enclosure and made the old hard drive into another external one.

After I told my mum about eDay, we decided to get the hard drives out of our computers before getting rid of them, in case there was any confidential data on there.

I removed the hard drives from the computers that were placed in the laundry on Sunday, but last night, mum brought down some more from our storage spaces upstairs. This morning she asked me to remove their hard drives. I had a bit of trouble with an even older home computer - I couldn't find the hard drive. Someone must have removed it ages ago. Meh, can't have been much on there anyway, it was only 2GB. Imagine that. When 40GB computers came out, we were still using a 2GB computer. Mum was talking on the phone to my uncle, who'd just bought a new computer, and she asked him how big his computer was, which was 40GB, and when we told my mum that our's was 2GB, she was like "2GB?!!", so we bought a new one, the one which now serves as an external hard drive.

Anyways, guess how many computers we took down to eDay? Eight. All of which I had to dismantle to get their hard drives out. Haha, the computer which already had the hard drive removed we sorta mutilated trying to get the CD drive removed (they use the same cables, so I thought - since I couldn't find a hard drive -  that it must have been a 2-in-1, til I dismantled the next computer and found that the CD drive used the same cables as the hard drive) because I didn't realise there were screws on the other side!

Anyways, we now have six hard drives which we don't even know what to do with. Mum's thinking of dunking them in water in order to destroy all the data on there. I guess I could buy some cables, connect it to our computer and reformat the hard drives to clear them, but that would cost money and who knows what it could do to our current computer, with unknown sources connected up to it. So I'll let mum get rid of them. They're all probably around 2-4GB anyway, no use would come out of them.

What do you think is the best way to destroy hard drives which might still have data on them?