There are many ways to cleanse data from hard drives, but most are only effective against amateur attempts at recovery. Utilities that overwrite bits once or twice can't defeat basic forensic gear, which is able to see subtle residual gradations in magnetic media from previous writes. Even Gutmann shredding, 35 slaps of random and sequential data, isn't good enough for the NSA, which recommends physical destruction of the media.
This drive of mine (pictured) was merely broken, not loaded with state secrets, but I thought I'd see how this piece of gear fared atop of my roaring hearth. It suffices to say that I did not know that it would half-melt into a curious distended blob. Talk about secure disposal!
More photos of my shining blob of alloy after the fold.
Tricksy the dog is as curious as I was, though with a rather different motive in mind: the melted Seagate proved, however, to be inedible.
Antikythera, anyone?
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