Wiping a hard disc before we dump our old PC

[Dorsetmike]

What a waste, destroying a hard disc; when you get the new PC get one with an SSD say 256Gb to use only for software, install the old hard disc and use it for storing data, images, music etc. The SSD gives you a faster machine but a large SSD costs more, so use the old disc for the data which is not so dependant on speed.
Both my PCs came with 256Gb SSDs and I installed 2Tb hard discs from older machines, my laptop has a 125Gb SSD and a 500Gb external drive, plus I have a couple more External drives one is image back up, the other video and music back up.

[ntpntpntp]

Not really a waste when it's an old low capacity disc that's been running for many years and is likely to fail in the near future anyway. They do have a finite lifetime.

Totally agree it's worth re-using reasonably new discs of reasonable capacity. I have a couple of old discs now sitting in external drive enclosures.  They don't get used much nowadays though, as I use a Network Attached Storage drive (NAS) for centralised storage of data and media (and as a printer server).  The NAS is easy to access from any of our household PCs and TVs, and easy to back-up.

[guest8885]

a large magnet should wipe it

[guest8885]

a large magnet can do it or can be used as a lump hammer

[Woodenhead]

If you can get past the 6 layers of physical security at their data centres, Google have some rather good machines that can destroy a hard drive in seconds.