Sorry. Shooting an arrow through a disk drive does not “erase” any data which can still be scraped off the unerased disk manually with the proper equipment.
Honestly, all most people are going for is make it hard enough casual crooks won’t gitcha. If we’re enough of a target that people are going to that kind of effort, it’s a whole different ball game. And there are many, many other possible attack vectors.
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best data erasure method? that doesn’t quite hold a candle to thermite
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This goes a long way in explaining why so few data repositories survived the Hundred Years’ War.
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Reminds me of when I prank called the manager of the sister store of the computer shop I worked for. I did my best Kansas rural drawl and explained I was putting a socket 7 chip in a socket 6 board, and it had a few too many pins on the edges, so I just snipped them off, but now it won’t turn on and wanted to see if I could swap it out.
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The French cross bow probably had better penetration power. Probably get through a least two HDs with a bolt.
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You know if you pull the platters out and hang them so they can clang together in the wind, they make a beautiful chime sound. The same is true of the stainless bearing rings inside the drives (about 1.5" diameter). They “ting” against each other quite hypnotically.
A screwdriver is a lot less dangerous. I take them apart, rescue the magnets to use on the fridge, and then the platters get used as coasters or mini frisbees or whatever seems apt, and the rest goes in electronics recycling. I only do this to the ones that are too old and small to be saleable on Ebay - those get wiped and sold (I am weird, but not stupid).
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Absolutely, but I have over a dozen to get through, and a deadline. Otherwise I’d love to have that many magnets 
It will if you zero the drive first
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Depends. If the platter substrate is ceramic, the arrow ought to be enough to shatter it. If it’s aluminum, then you have potential issues with the non-arrowy portion of the platter being recoverable. Even in that case, though, you’ve changed your threat model from “any idiot who finds the drive and plugs it in” to “people with specialized hardware for recovering data from damaged platters” – which is probably a sufficient security margin for those of us who aren’t interesting enough to have federal agents trawling through our garbage daily.
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