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My 3.0 portable HD was corrupted, I've got personal data on it and I wanted to prevent any randoms from accessing it. I am not very tool-savvy, so I just broke the circuit board, and repeatably bashed it with a hammer on both sides. I wasn't able to access the platter but I did hear some broken shards on the inside traveling around when I would shake it, so I either broke the platter just by hitting with impact, or there was something else in there that broke. Thoughts?

T.c
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  • It's likely very broken. No one has even proven to have successfully recovered data from a broken platter. If you want to be sure the platters are broken then the easiest way will be to simply drill through the drive a few times. – djsmiley2kStaysInside Feb 20 '17 at 13:56
  • I disagree with the closure as a duplicate. [Dispose or Recycle Hard Drive](https://superuser.com/q/10114/53590) specifically seeks methods "which result in having a usable drive at the end", whereas this question is pretty clearly about actual destruction of the drive. Voting to reopen. – user Feb 20 '17 at 14:15
  • Just use a bigger hammer... & don't swing it like a girl [whether or not you may actually be a girl or not has nothing to do with this, btw - this is not a sexist comment, this is a hammer-technique comment ;) – Tetsujin Feb 20 '17 at 19:27
  • This may not be a duplicate, but it asks for opinions about what specific parts broke inside the drive and whether that renders the data unrecoverable. Nobody here can answer that. Is the purpose of reopening to close it for another reason? – fixer1234 Feb 20 '17 at 22:31

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Braking the circuit board or the header do nothing! It's all about the platters inside, some hard-disk contain many platter layers.

enter image description here

Narzan Q.
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  • Read again. I definitely broke something in the platter area as I heard it in pieces. – T.c Feb 20 '17 at 14:02
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    @T.c Look at the picture that narzan included in the answer; there are absolutely parts beside tha platters that under large physical stress could break off or come loose and rattle around in the compartment that holds the platters. I'm not sure how *likely* it is, and it likely depends on the type of drive; Wikipedia [claims](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive_platter#Manufacture) that laptop HDDs commonly use glass platters, and desktop drives aluminum platters, but one of the two references for that claim dates back to 2007 so may no longer be relevant. – user Feb 20 '17 at 14:20
  • It's an external portable hard drive that this question is about. They use glass platters often do they not? – T.c Feb 20 '17 at 14:39