Our neighbors are moving back to Canada, and in a box of old computer junk I offered to make go away, there were a couple of external drives. Wayne wasn’t sure if they had data on them. I offered to find out, if possible, and sanitize them.
The smaller had a long-deprecated Mini-AB USB port. It’s been a while since I had a cable that would fit the early-2000s USB port, so I pulled out the 2.5″ 160 GB drive, clamped it in the vice, and gave it a couple of smacks with a hammer. Ta.
The other was a monster by comparison, a 5.25″ drive manufactured in 2003 with a capacity of (drum roll, please) 5 GB! It looked like an old Apple Firewire connection–again, nothing like that lying around. I was unable or unwilling to completely disassemble the hard drive assembly, so I drilled a few holes through the drive. Ta.
The case was an aluminum wonder which I planned to recycle, but after mentioning to a couple of people that you could probably run over it with a car without hurting it, I knew what I had to do.
Yup.
That would have been a very well protected 5 GB of data!
