Voting hammer. Or drill some holes through the hd case.
Microwave “for a few sec” would do nothing except produce a few sparks is my guess. Leave it in long enough and you might start a fire. (I have deliberately ignited a plasma in a microwave without so much as blowing a fuse. I’m not saying this is a good idea.)
Plugging the drive into a working computer and just formatting it will make any data on it unrecoverable to 99.9999999% of the people on earth, and the other 0.0000001% have much better things to do with their time.
In addition to the absurdity of thinking you have James Bond’s hard drive, it’s also destroying working hardware that could still be useful to somebody.
I don’t know even know how to take a hard drive out of a laptop. And now I have got to figure out how to plug it into something else. I’m not handy at all, but I think a hammer and drill solution would be way faster.
I agree that if donating it were feasible, then that’s a different story. I use my computers for a very long time, though. Not sure anyone would even want them when I’m done with them.
Somebody will want it. Just this year I sold a 9 year old laptop that was crappy to begin with, and a 12 year old point-and-shoot camera that took worse pictures than an iPhone 3. And both buyers gave positive reviews after receiving the item.
If you don’t know how to take out the hard drive how do you even know where to hammer/drill? Newer SSD’s aren’t much bigger than a stick of gum.