What to do with old hard drives?
I've accumulated several old hard drives, either replacing with bigger capacity ones, or replacing ones that started showing SMART errors about potential data loss. Any suggestions for a creative uses, like building free public web server with caveat that data will be lost? And if I went with recycling, how to ensure that whole data is erased?
Laptop drives are flimsily constructed and can have the platters shattered and impossible to read with one hammer strike.
Keep a second or third backup. If you want to be sure of the erased data you can simply drill few holes in them. But it’s a very extreme procedure. A two/three pass of “erase all data” is okay. HDD are not SSD that keeps the data when not “write 0 to safe erase the SSD”
Pull it apart. pull the magnets for the numerous uses they have; and use the platters for windchimes. The head stack rides on an awesome bearing, too.