Midchuck -

Mr Redface has the problem that he wants to get a warranty replacement for the hard drive. To do that, he must return the failed drive to the manufacturer.

I'm not sure that they'd honor the warranty if he returns one with a bullet hole in it, and the truly paranoid probably already know that quite a lot can be recovered from hard drives that have been dropped from airplanes, tossed into campfires, or suffered other extreme abuse. It is not necessary to have even the entire platter from a hard drive to obtain "some data" from a broken one, although it's incredibly expensive and only the FBI (or a few other very zealous prosecuters) can afford to do it.

With 350GB hard drives going for <$200 in some places, maybe the warranty replacement isn't a good trade-off for the risk(?); but there'd need to be real concern before I'd resort to that, even if my "art collection" does include some "classic beauties."

John