Recycling laptops

[QED]

I have 3 old laptops that I want to donate to an organization run for high school tech nerds. These machines are between 8 & 15 years old. What should I do with them before donating? Should I reformat the hard drive? If so, how do I do that?

Or should I just remove the hard drive completely?

[mahatmakanejeeves]

1. If you remove the hard drive, you reduce the value to zero.

What does the organization say to do?

[QED]

4. Good question...

I'll email them and ask. I didn't see any info on their website about this.

https://azstrut.org/

[QED]

6. I should have read more on their website...the info is there.

https://azstrut.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/AZ-StRUT-Hard-Drive-Security-Procedure.pdf

They will wipe the drives.

[OLDMDDEM]

2. I removed the hard drive. Where are you donating them? I have 3 also.

[QED]

3. It's an organization in AZ called Strut

They refurbish them..

https://azstrut.org/

[OLDMDDEM]

5. Thanks. I live in Maryland so I am going to see if there is a place similar to AZStrut.

[bucolic_frolic]

7. Supposedly hard drives can be written over 99 times in one operation

Randoming out the data, replacing it with zeros. But some say they can still recover data.

Personally I'd be ok with DoD (Dept of Defense) erasure, then I'd probably pass a strong magnet from an old hard drive over it 99 times. As to whether it would still operate ....?

But then I've never disposed of a hard drive. They simply wore out from exhaustion.

[canetoad]

8. There are several free tools

To make hard drives unrecoverable.

https://diskwipe.org/ This is one of them. You can search for others but beware the ones that say "Free download" or similar. There will be a catch such as disabled features. You need to find true Freeware.