Also, remember that neodymium magnets are dangerous.) (Note: keep strong magnets away from hard drives because they might damage the read/write head and stop the drive from working. Not even a 3in neodymium magnet costing almost $350 had any effect on the data. Unless you happen to know someone who already has a hard disk degausser, this is probably not an option.ĭespite what you see in the movies, you can’t erase a modern hard drive using powerful magnets. The Intimus 20000 is a good example, and you could buy one for £35,783.27 or possibly less. In theory, you could also use a degaussing machine, which uses very strong magnetic fields to erase all forms of magnetic media – disks and tapes. This has two drive slots, so as well as erasing hard drives and SSDs, it can clone them for backup purposes. One cheaper alternative is StarTech’s USB Hard Drive Duplicator and Eraser Dock (£51.91), which I found by searching Amazon. The best known device, the Drive eRazer Ultra, cost about £/$250 when available. Unfortunately, it’s not economical to buy one for a single drive. This is much the easiest way to erase hard drives, and companies that decommission lots of PCs should think about buying one. If you don’t have a PC, you could buy a standalone hard drive eraser. If you have another laptop, you can mount it in an external hard drive enclosure, then connect it to another PC via a USB port. If you have a desktop tower with a spare drive bay, you can mount the laptop drive inside, by connecting the power and data cables. However, if you want to delete your data and reinstall the hard drive, you will need either another PC or a hard disk eraser. This is unlikely.īecause your laptop won’t boot, you will have to do what an attacker or repairer would do: remove the hard drive from the laptop.

Whether or not the buyer replaces the motherboard, they will probably be able to read your hard drive, unless you encrypted it with an unhackable password. And, of course, if you don’t do it, you could be at significant financial risk, depending on the information stored on it. Selling dead machines for spares or repair is even riskier, and how much would your Acer be worth? I doubt it will fetch enough to make it worth spending the time and (probably) money needed to erase your data.

How to clear hard drive