How to securely, physically destroy a hard drive at home?

You want fast and simple?

Step 1: Try and take it apart. If you have the right screwdrivers, great, if not, just go to the next step.

EDIT2: Also use sandpaper on the platters before smashing them. It's very hard to smash into small enough pieces, and very hard to sand afterwards. If you can spend a bit of money, there are also dedicated kits, such as DiskStroyer which provide instructions. Apparently, they also provide a magnet and screwdrivers.

Step 2: Have at it with the biggest, heaviest metal hammer you have. Hit the platters a few times and it should shatter. (EDIT: NB: Make sure you smash the logic board (all the green stuff) up decently as well. Modern HDDs have 32-64 MBs of cache, and SSHDs have around 8 GB, and we don't want anyone to get a single bit)

Step 3: Find a big magnet and go over the disk a few times.

Step 4: Find a really hot flame, and melt the data off. A good gas flame can get up to 1200 °C, easily enough to demagnetise even the toughest materials.

And you're done! Send your now thoroughly unusable drive into the bin, or a recycling center, or whatever else you do to dispose of electronics.

EDIT: To be completely honest, I would do this to an encrypted drive as well, with the logic that any drive needing encryption should be disposed securely to prevent the exploitation of vulnerabilities in the encryption discovered in the future.

First, write it over on the sector-level with random data. You can do this multiple times.

After that, you can take it apart with a screwdriver.

In your place I would use simple sandpaper to destroy the magnetized data layer on the plates mechanically.

Extension: It is also highly suggested to destroy its electronic, sometimes it contains also a flash ram for cache or for service data, which is also persistent data of the drive which you want to destroy.

Electric drill

If you have any kind of electric drill or cordless screwdriver the easiest and quickest way is to just drill a dozen holes through them.

• The disk housing is generally made from aluminium, which is fairly soft. Any kind of metal drill bit (probably even the ones used for brick walls) will do the trick easily.
• Make sure to drill the holes in various places and pay attention to actually punch the contained data disks.
• The entire procedure is very quick and quite safe, although wearing eye protection is recommended when drilling metal. (Although bashing the thing with a big heavy hammer has its own merits, even if not very efficient ;))