Hammer, then marinate for atleast 30 mins in soya sauce, onion, garlic, herbs, then bbq, eat and poop in 3 different bathrooms across the city. Pro tip, sprinkle with olive oil each side while on the grill.

Depends on the type of drives and your needs.

If the drive is big enough to be used as storage/back, get it out and in its own USB enclosure.

If the drive is either too small or you have too may already then :

• SSD : smash it to pieces with a hammer
• HDD : if you’re sure it’s not an hybrid (in which case the SSD process applies) then you can just fill it with garbage or use whatever “erasing” software out there. I would go for an open-source one.

‘zeroing’ every sector is probably ‘good enough’ for mechanical hard drives.

if the laptops are functional:

boot a target laptop to a windows install disk or usb. at the first prompt, hit SHIFT-F10 to open a command window.

diskpart

list disk

select disk 0
(laptop internal drive should be disk 0)

clean all
(this will take time. on an older laptop, up to maybe an hour per 250gb of hdd capacity.)

exit

power off.

if they’re NOT functional laptops:

remove the hdd (search the make and model at yt for guides), connect to another pc (via usb adapter) or internal inside a dt. boot to that system’s normal windows, run diskpart from an admin command prompt… do the same as above but note that in this case: IT WON’T BE DISK 0 – be sure to ‘select’ the correct disk

if one of them happens to be an ssd. instead of wiping it (this method isn’t for ssd, btw), get an enclosure for it (as little as $8-10) and use it as an external disk.

Since no one mentioned it: VCR tape eraser.

Basically just an electromagnet that oscillates because it’s running directly from AC current.

With an extension cord you could erase all the hard drives in a computer lab just waving the eraser vaguely where the drives are.

Physical destruction is better though.

You’ve said you’re intending to throw these laptops away, so physical destruction is quickest and simplest.

But, if you’re intending to sell or give these away for someone else to use, zeroing each sector is probably ‘good enough’ for your purpose (as someone else has always said).

If you really want to make it harder, you can use something like the Boot and Nuke bootable Linux disk for the job, as it also has the option of multiple passes, using zeroing and/or binary random shit for each sector. Just grab the free for personal use version.

Use vericrypt to encrypt the drive with a long random password and immediately forget said password

Just turn on disk encryption.

It depends how badly you need that data to never see the light of day again. Most likely, you’ll be fine to erase the drives with secure erase options (where it writes 0 and then 1 to the whole drive, and back and forth a few times depending on settings), but if you really really need to 100% guarantee there’s absolutely no chance of recovery, then you’ll need to destroy the drives physically

Laughing at all the Hollywood shit in this thread. A single pass erase (or ATA Secure Erase, if they are SSDs that support the command) is more than enough. Nobody is going to waste time and money recovering data of unknown provenance from a landfill.

If they are Windows and have Bitlocker encrypt the whole drive and throw away the key. If not get Veracrypt for free and encrypt the entire drive. Once the drive is fully encrypted and has no backup key you can just trash it. If this was commercial use I would then send it to a third party to be certified destroyed.

Smuggle the laptops into the cargo bay of Elon’s next Starship launch.

Here’s a good article from Tom’s: https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/secure-erase-ssd-or-hard-drive

If you live near an active volcano, dumping them directly into the core should be pretty effective