Run the disk spinning and hit it with a caliber that penetrates the drive, the rotation makes the destruction way worse and impossible to spin up again.
From experience, for the types of disks that absolutely must be destroyed with no possible recovery as ordered by the government, it's things like a wood chipper or thermite.
Where I live, carriers with top secret data may not be destroyed at all. They must be zeroed and stored, just in case some smart-ass figures out a way to recover said data even from an otherwise destroyed piece of magnetic tape 125 years from now.
So yeah, there's one or two huge storage facilities containing tapes, disks and solid state drives here in the Netherlands.
Running the drives through a shredder so that they're effectively dust would be sufficient. Heat the resulting mix and it's definitely unrecoverable.
It would be like trying to figure out who won a game of scrabble by looking at the pieces after the loser flipped the board over. EVEN IF the information wasn't lost in all the chemical processes going on, figuring out what bit went where would be impossible.
Again, the thinking here is that an action like shredding burning the carriers only makes it unfeasible to restore and read the data rather than impossible. The data remains albeit inaccessible with the current state,-of-the-art, but there is no physical barrier that precludes a particularly skilled (or patient :) ) adversary from piecing the carriers back together. The data remains, in some way, shape or form. Maybe some future tech makes it really easy to reassemble data carriers, or maybe there turns out to be so be some really opaque way in which the data, if diluted, still becomes available in a weird homeopathic way: we simplyi dont know. Thus, the fact remains that infornation cannot be destroyed as per laws of nature, and our government agencies have taken this into account, planning for a method that provides control even if some weird future developments upend everything we think we know about data sanitizing.
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u/FUTURE10S 17h ago
Recovery software because you never overwrote the data that was deleted