A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do

I finally tackled an item on my to-do list that I've been avoiding. I have an old computer that I've been holding onto until I had time to dismantle it so that I could remove the hard drive and destroy it. You don't want anyone getting a hold of your personal stuff, you know. The hard drive is the small silver box laying to the right of my dismantled computer.

Apparently, erasing your hard drive does not actually erase the hard drive. Formatting your hard drive only makes it so that your computer loses the directions to your information and therefore isn't able to retrieve it. In both of these cases, your information is still there and retrievable by hackers.

Here is the hard drive after being opened and that round silver disk is what I'm trying remove and destroy. I drilled about 7 holes in the hard disk and then beat it up with the claw side of a hammer. During this process, I found out why it's called a hard disk. I had to bang on it with all my strength just to make a dent. Hopefully I've done enough damage to keep any potential hackers from getting a hold of my goodies. We wouldn't want that.