In working condition, I think old hard drives would carry significant value for people who want a completely period correct build. This would be especially true for drives from a time where people expect them to make a certain noise, and also where there are compatibility issues involved. However, they won't shoot up in value until we reach a point where working drives of their age become extremely hard to find.
brostenen wrote:I never ever sell my drives. I don't like the fact that deleted data is in fact not deleted.
When drives are defunct, I just destroy the platters and keep the magnets.
If you just delete/format at the filesystem level, then this is true, because it leaves a lot of data behind. But if you completely zero fill the drive, then the data is truly and completely gone. Nobody can flip the bits back(*), they can only read what didn't get wiped.
I like to wipe drives using the linux/unix command 'dd', but if you're not familiar with that environment, then there's also utilities like the ones KT7AGuy linked which will do this. I tried DBAN some years ago, but it was slow, which is why I prefer dd.
SSDs are different, but those have a function in firmware to securely wipe themselves. I don't know the best way to invoke that.
* = Some hard drive wiping utilities get carried away with fancy random number schemes and multiple passes. This is meant to thwart the theory of somebody finding trace magnetic signatures of past data on the drive platter. This slows them down and it's really tinfoil hat stuff. A simple zero fill will make the data unrecoverable to anyone on this planet. But if there's a major government agency desperately after you, maybe the multi-pass schemes are worth the time. 😀