My mid 2010 27" iMac's factory hdd went bad, so i removed it, replaced it with an ssd and now that i have it in my hands im thinking about what should my next actions be before recycling it. When it was in my iMac, it was sluggish and not appearing all the data stored. Now that its out, i placed it in an OWC drive bay (Mercuty Elite Pro Qx2 and its not responding, its not even visible in HardDiskUtility). What are my options now? Is there some hardware i can mount it on to give it one last chance to see it and perhaps give it one last format?
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last actions for a hdd that went bad
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If the drive isn't even mounting in Disk Utility, there likely isn't much else that you can do other than to take a hammer to it or drill holes in it. You could take a torx screwdriver and try to open it up. Doing so outside of a clean room makes it near impossible to recover data from. But I might go the hammer and/or drill method if you're particularly worried about your data getting into the wrong hands.
Take the cover off and add it to your museum of broken parts, or show it to your less techy friends how a hard drive works. I have both a 3.5" and 2.5" sitting on my desk. Or smash it with a hammer, I've done that too.
Unless you're worried about some government agency or high scale industrial spy is interested in your data, just drill it, hammer it, torch it, whatever... nobody is going to try to recover data from a random broken disk. There are billions of good ones to poke your nose around.
And if you ARE worried about governments and spies, then you shouldn't look for advice on a website
And if you ARE worried about governments and spies, then you shouldn't look for advice on a website