You could use Secure Erase and then a full drive wipe program that doesn't rely on Secure Erase. That will be pretty fail safe. The general theme is that the best method is not physically destroying the drive in any of these outlandish ways, but rather simply wiping the drive. The drive should be encrypted as well to aide in this, because if the drive is encrypted only the key actually needs to be wiped in the majority of cases. In the case of solid state drives using FDE is even more important. I have read about some solid state drives that automatically and seamlessly encrypt everything put onto the drive, in some cases they don't even require you to set a password. I can only imagine that this is to aide in secure erase, so that they only need to protect a small area of the drive where the encryption key is held, and then they can wipe the encryption key during the secure erase procedure to essentially wipe the drive. This method of secure erase on SSD would have the benefit of not needing to spend write cycles going over the entire drive as well, but it would be a bit different from regular secure erase where data is actually destroyed rather than made (usually) impossible to access. Anyway I still say that the technique used should be FDE and then if you ever need to start fresh you can do a wipe with Secure Erase and if you are worried Secure Erase was not implemented properly for your device you can do another pass with something that simply fills the platter with 0's. Data deletion from persistent storage is not something that is going to be possible in an emergency situation anyway, it is laughable to think you will have time to put in a CD and start an erase program while the police are kicking your door in, at best you will have time to cut power to your system to clear your volatile memory of encryption keys. I know Secure Erase was found to be improperly implemented on some percentage of tested solid state drives, but I have not heard of any research claiming one way or the other as far as hard drives go. If you are worried that Secure Erase is not properly implemented on your device you could first wipe with Secure Erase and then do another wipe where you simply fill the platter with 0's using software that doesn't rely on Secure Erase. If your drive is fully encrypted you are even better off since you in most cases (pretty much all cases where the attacker doesn't already have your encryption key) you will only need to securely wipe the encryption key to render all other information on the drive impossible to recover. Yes I have read the research indicating that not all solid state drives have a properly implemented Secure Erase function. I had assumed the OP was talking about a hard drive but that is a bad assumption on my part since there are very important differences between wiping a hard drive and a solid state drive. In the case of a hard drive I would feel much more comfortable with Secure Erase, and very confident with Secure Erase followed by filling the platter with 0's with some other software. In the case of solid state drives things become more difficult. Many solid state drives have properly implemented Secure Erase and if you happen to have such a SSD using Secure Erase is sufficient. On the other hand, several solid state drives have been shown to have incorrectly implemented Secure Erase functions, and in such a case not only will Secure Erase not be sufficient, but filling the drive with 0's after the Secure Erase will still probably not be sufficient. So if you have a Solid State drive I think that you really need to do your research to make sure that the drive can actually be wiped with any level of confidence. One thing I have noticed is that several of the current generation (brand new) motherboards have connectors for SSD Secure Erase, I wonder if those are more reliable than the built in Secure Erase functions on the drives. I also have noticed that several new SSD's appear to be automatically encrypted but without a password, I can only imagine that this encryption is entirely with the goal of being able to Secure Erase by wiping a small protected area of the SSD where the encryption key is held. I completely disagree with this. Secure Erase was originally designed to securely erase data from mechanical hard drive platters. I believe it does two passes, one with the magnetic head on track center and one with it slightly off center to wipe magnetic edge residue. This is generally considered to be overkill. Definitely a platter that is smashed can be read with spin stand microscopy, and only a very trivial amount of information is actually destroyed with every fracture of the drive. There has been a great deal of debate about if forensics can pull data that has been overwritten or not, in the past it was widely thought that they could pull data even after it had been overwritten, but in modern times most people think that they cannot. Even in the forensics community there is much debate over this, but I am forced to agree with the people who argue against the possibility of recovering overwritten data simply because nobody seems to be able to respond to their argument of "show me a single example of where overwritten data was actually pulled off of a completely wiped hard drive, ever". In the past there was a theoretical paper by Gutmann that theorized that a magnetic microscope could recover overwritten data unless it was overwritten many dozens of times, but I think this is largely seen as impossible with modern drives which have much greater density. In any case Secure Erase does two passes and there are various software programs for doing 35 or more passes.