OT! Destroying old hard drives and backup tapes Options

[Qarl]

I literally have about 4 dozen old hard drives (between 6 and 10 gigabytes each) and about 60 old backup tapes that I need to secure lyerase and destroy.

Can I go to my local surplus store and get a mega magnet (like the one you would retrieve crap off of the bottom of a lake using a rope) and demagnetize and erase them?

They have medical information on them and I need to render the drives usesless and unreadable.

I do not want to sit there for 6 hours witha sledge hammer and I don't have enough drill bits to drill through the platters?

Will a heavy duty magnet work?

What are my other options.

[r_towle]

the only sure way (DOD approved) is to destroy the platters themselves..

If you dont want to take them apart and break the platters, there are companies that do this as part of the business.

Ask around, look in the yellow pages..they used to just come with portable shredders, now I think they have heavy duty ones for things like hard drives..and you can watch to sign off on the job.

If you cant find one, contact a local defense contractor...ask the IT guys..or the head of Security...its there job to destroy the stuff, so they know who the companies are..
Rich