[Dr. Sivana]

If it isn’t a solid state drive, you can use a magnet on it and you are good to go.

Besides the shielding, even if you did have a a heavy duty magnetic, you may mess up the low level formatting info on a modern SATA drive, which could make the drive fail completely. Modern drives don't allow you to do real low level formatted from the OS, as he drives come pre-encoded. Anyone who had to low level format drives with DEBUG, etc. appreciates the convenience, but some control is the cost.

[dayglored]

> Anyone who had to low level format drives with DEBUG, etc. appreciates the convenience...

Wow, my neck neck nearly snapped with the whiplash from that comment... blast from the past! Ah, yes, DEBUG. [shudder] I wrote a good number of programs using DEBUG's built-in mini-assembler.

You're quite right, of course. Remember when hard drives came from the manufacturer with the bad sector table printed (dot matrix of course) on a piece of paper taped to the top of the drive? I thought it was a Big Deal when OnTrack came out with a utility that would let you enter the bad sector map semi-intelligently.

Of course that kind of foolishness went out when they went to variable sectors-per-track formatting. And the modern "low-level format" takes care of all that internally so that the SATA or other interface only sees an unbroken list of data blocks.

It boggles my mind that fdisk and similar formatting tools still talk about heads and sectors. That's all insanely out of date on rotators, much less SSDs.

[GingisK]

The idea was to destroy the drive’s content.