You've got funny customs in Canada :)

no don't worry I'm a special case.

When I want to see what's inside something I tend to look it up on Google ;).... that said I do dismantle stuff too but usually to fix it but I know you can't open a hard drive and fix it. Feel free to remove the platters and have fun throwing them.

nono you open it up again and unscrew the drive platters then just put finger prints all over them sometimes they are made of glass so are shatterable if they are aluminium you can bend them personally I just coat them in my OH's clear nail varnish and use them as mirrors... keep the magets from the drive heads they are rather nice rareearth magnet sets.
You can open them it just takes time and planning.
1. stick the drive in a baggy and seal it.
next steps all take place in the bathroom
2. set up somewhere you can work on put some alchol wipes on it close the door and turn on the shower till you have steam in the room
3. wait for the steam to go
4. wipe down the top with the alcohol wipes so it's clean and dry
You now have a low tech dust free room where you can open the drive semi safely.
I've used that technique to add a port on peoples drives for them so they can show the disks spinning I charge the same price as the HDD drive and don't guarantee the work but people still get me to do it occasionally...

Man, now I want a 127 PetaByte HDD :-(

I wonder if it will stop at the real actual size of the disk or if its going to try to have me do a 127 petabyte image

so far 615 / 133 169 152 gigabyte imaged

It'll be awesome when you open that one up so the data can flow over and it suddenly can store 32 yottabytes.

I mean, that HAS to be why it's suddenly so spacious, right? The lid isn't on and data can be stored outside.

Since you've opened it, I would expect it to be closer to the $10k end of the spectrum.

If it's a glass platter or mostly glass, you can wack it with a hammer and it should more or less just shatter. Wear protective eyewear when doing it.

Otherwise, you can play blacksmith with it. Heat it up and bend it into interesting shapes. Realistically it doesn't take that much damage to make it essentially unreadable. Most of the time nobody's going to try to read it unless they know what they're looking for.

Suddenly have the urge to learn how to recover data of of old thrown out HDDs......dunno why. :\

its like a mission, while I know its going to fail I am trying all programs to see if even one will find a single file

99.9% of the time all you have to do is plug it in... about 1/2 of the rest of the cases all you need do is replace the drive board with one from the same type of drive... if it's been null 'd yeah not gonna happen

[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix[/url]) despite what many people think with modern drives you can't recover a true disc blank using dd to write dev/null to the drive kills its data