Physical destruction of a laptop hard drive

Tonight I spent some time destroying two hard drives for an old laptop that I no longer use. Both were hard disk drives. I had previously backed up the data on the hard drives, and then wiped the drives, but I wanted to take the additional step of making whatever remained on them physically impossible to access.

After wiping the drives, I tried to recover data from them using recovery tools included with the Hiren BootCD (see here), just to confirm the wiping software had been effective.

The first step was to remove the battery, so any chance of an electric shock could be eliminated. Next using a precision screwdriver, I removed the covers for the two drives in the laptop, which were both secured inside with metal braces, which also had to be removed.

The drives each had a controller board on one side, and a metal plate on the opposite side.

I did not have the right tools to unscrew the metal plate, so I drilled through each drive from the side with the controller board.

Drilling one hole took several minutes with a no-frills Black & Decker drill. While I managed to put two deep holes in each drive, I was not able to penetrate past the metal plate case on the opposite side.

A lot of people make the mistake of ending their effort to physically destroy a drive at this point. However, it is possible for the platters in the HDDs to still be intact after holes like these have been drilled. See for example this video posted by @cfldriven in which he demonstrates how drives with large drill holes . . .

. . . still have platters from which data can be recovered:

I couldn't pry off the metal plate to reveal the platters on my drives, but I was able to open up the holes I drilled further with a screwdriver and confirm that the platters had been smashed.

It was possible to hear the pieces rattling around inside, and several small broken shards spilled out of the case.

Of course, the more common solid state drives used in most laptops manufactured in recent years don't have platters, and drilling several holes in them may leave some of the chips on which they store data undamaged.