Quote Originally Posted by quazimoto View Post
Once you remove the platters off the spindle you have a better chance playing the lottery than recovering the information on those platters. To add to the problem if a smoke particle or one particle of dust were to be on the platter when trying to rebuild and read the disk would crash the head.The heads that read the platter float less than 5 nanometers above the platter. To put this is prospective a single fingerprint has a thickness of over 12,000 nanometers.

as an it tech i have to go against this. itis still easly recoverable expecialy by the government
as an it tech, i take hard drives now for free rather then charging and i garantee i will destroy them
i have custom programs which wipe hard drives to even the government cant get the files back
at that point, i can sell them
all the time i come across dead hard drives
at that point, i open them up, take every platter and scratch both sides ontil theres thick indents with scratches meaning sliding a read/write head over it would just rip the sensor off it
at that point its nolonger recoverable
DO NOT TRUST THE "rub a strong magnet over it" TRICK