I was totally sure that the contents of the hard drives had been transferred to the hard drives I now use years ago. However I couldn’t remember if the old drives had been erased or not and I didn’t want to go putting them into cases and checking.

I did have a bit of a search of the web to see how other people had destroyed them. None of the suggestions I looked at seemed very suitable for me. Advice included driving a car over the hard drives. I don’t have a car and I think it’s quite likely that the discs inside the hard drives would survive that. Another suggestion was to use a sledge hammer on them. That was better but I don’t have a sledge hammer and even if I did I can imagine that with the hammering maybe some of the hard drive would go flying off around the place. I do have a black & decker drill and so I decided that I would use that. I clamped each one in my DIY workbench thing and then got to work with my drill.

More pics in gallery

They put up quite a fight. It wasn’t too bad getting the drill bit to go through each one, but the casing on one side, I think the top as I view them, was always quite tough to get through. I’m sure I didn’t need to put a hole all the way through but I felt that if I could see right through the drive then I was sure that it was totally destroyed!

I’m trying to avoid getting into a “I remember when we were happy with 512KB” type of thing, but it is amazing how things can so quickly become of no value.

The hard drive unit is one of those internal components which has become recognisable to those with no technical experience. It is like the thermionic valve.

I remember being surprised that Apple had used an actual illustration of a hard drive as the icon for the computer screen. Then thinking about it, it wasn’t so suprising. With the very first Macs the icon was of a removable disc, because that’s what they used. Then when they started using built in hard drives the icon became a rather anonymous box with what looked like a light or something on the front. So, they’d never extended that desktop analogy into displaying drives. I’m quite glad because I am not a huge fan of the desktop analogy. If they had extended it maybe they would have used a filing cabinet as the icon.