I have a couple of old laptops lying around and want to throw them away, but have been cautious to do so because of privacy concerns of data still on the hard drives. What is the best way to wipe them? Or should I take them out and physically destroy them?
They are running windows vista and 10 I think.
It takes far more work to recover data off of smashed platters than Joe the average users data is worth. There’s very few ways to make that data completely nonrecoverable. Even zeroing the drive isn’t 100% safe from someone with the right resources and knowhow. Just smashing the platters makes data recovery enough of a pain that it’s almost never worth it.
Data on a HDD that’s been overwritten with zeros or random data is unrecoverable with all known current technology.
In theory it might be possible to recover something with some future tech that hasn’t been invented yet, which is why the DOD standard requires erasing with multiple passes, but there isn’t currently a (publicly known) way of doing it.
SSDs are a bit tricky because of wear levelling, but usually two full overwrites of a SSD makes it just as unrecoverable.