>Hit it with a hammer That's not really good enough to destroy sensitive data. Even if you break the platters into 1/64 in² pieces, each one will still carry 1

>Hit it with a hammer That's not really good enough to destroy sensitive data. Even if you break the platters into 1/64 in² pieces, each one will still carry 10s or 100s of megabytes. Recovering the data off of those fragments will be very expensive, so an embarrassing love letter is probably safe at that point, but if you're destroying something more valuable to a hostile third party, it's not going to be adequate.