On Thu, 19 Jan 2012, Josh More wrote: > If you're in the Navy, of course, you just toss the platters overboard > and let the salt water do it's thing. You and so many of the other TCLUG people are reckless with your top-secret data. If you throw it in the water, a shark might swallow it. Then the shark might get caught by Japanese fishermen and the fishermen will cut the shark open and find the hard drive. The stomach acids will have started to work on the case, but they'll just give the hard drive to the Japanese national security IT team and they'll replace the case and the board with new parts and they'll scrape the data off the drive. After a few days of scanning they'll recover most of the data on the disk. Then they'll have their supercomputer decrypt some of it and eventually they'll find it ... Your wife's Gmail password. Game Over. Don't take chances. Use a sledge hammer to crush all of the parts before throwing the hard drive into a volcano. This is why I only use *active* volcanos to destroy my old hard drives. It's really the only secure way. Mike