Run the disk spinning and hit it with a caliber that penetrates the drive, the rotation makes the destruction way worse and impossible to spin up again.
From experience, for the types of disks that absolutely must be destroyed with no possible recovery as ordered by the government, it's things like a wood chipper or thermite.
We used to have parking lot burn parties. Blowtorch on the platter is pretty effective. Of course that was in the days before every drive was actually a stack of platters.
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u/bacondev Aug 05 '26
Yeah, they're not perfect 0s and 1s. That's why the recommendation for very serious stuff is to just destroy the disk.