When recycling a computer, wipe the hard drive with tools that do more than just delete sensitive files ... There are companies that offer a secure hard-drive destruction service for various fees.

A typical home desktop computer or laptop hard drive can contain your social security number, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and website logins and passwords. This information can ...

CyberCrunch: This company specializes in data destruction, so if you’ve done a factory reset on your laptop, but you haven’t bothered to destroy or at least take out your hard drive ...

Grab a power drill and make a few holes straight through the drive. This messes with the internal platters, making data recovery impossible. Place the drive in a bag (to avoid flying bits of metal) ...

Once you have the drive out, you’ll need a dock to connect a bare drive to your computer via USB. You can buy a dock online for around $25. The dock will power the drive and you’ll know pretty ...

The findings highlight a well-known fact: most users don't have thorough destruction or disposal plans after replacing damaged or obsolete hard drives (e.g. those relying on PATA or SCSI interfaces).