The answer is no. At best, Clorox will degrade the contacts on the circuit board, but the platters inside the hard disk are where the data is stored. In practical terms, you could damage the board and most people will not be able to access it, but if you're keeping industrial level secrets, you'll be better off to open it and destroy the platters.

Most hard drive manufacturers use aluminum platters coated with iron oxide, however IBM used glass platters, before they sold their hard drive manufacturing to Hitachi. Hitachi may still use glass platters, and so if the drives in question are Hitachi-made, then if you open the cases, you may be able to shatter the platters, which will make them impossible to access and recover data from.

If you need to destory the data without tools, thermite might be a suitable solution for you. Bare in mind that it's unstable and gets extremely hot very quickly, but it will melt through the case and burn the hell out of the platters, leaving nothing intact. Otherwise, just pay $5 on ebay for a screwdriver kit and disassemble it yourself.

If the drive is still usable, you can use DBAN. It has a number of options that each erase the hard drive by writing a string of random characters over the disk, multiple times if you desire.

View the original article here