What you need: An old drive; a drive caddy; toolkit Time required: One hour
The component you should care most about when disposing of an old computer is the hard drive. That’s not because it’s necessarily the most environmentally hazardous, but because it’s typically packed with personal information that could be used and abused by a scammer.
Even formatting it isn’t guaranteed to wipe all your data. This simply wipes the index that Windows uses to find your content, but leaves the actual files in place. Anyone with the right tools could pick up your computer from the tip, take it home, and recover your data within a few minutes. The same goes for anyone who buys it second hand.
One solution is to physically destroy your drive, as we demonstrated in Issue 637 (read it on our 2022 Back Issue CD – ). Or you could remove it from your old computer and insert it into a caddy to use as an external drive. This will not only prevent your data falling into the wrong hands, but also give you the benefit of additional storage at minimal cost. Here we’ll explain how to do this using an old SSD.
