Re: What is the universal (world wide) understanding behind degaussing harddisks?

[Michael Stone]

Degaussing a hard drive will render it inoperative. It's also relatively 
hard to do/requires special equipment. (Just waving a refrigerator 
magnet around isn't going to do it.) Degaussing should be understood as 
a final step before discarding equipment. (And, for what it's worth, 
it's not a process I generally favor because it's hard to verify that 
the data on the disk has actually been erased; in most cases I'd 
recommend physical destruction over degaussing.)

Mike Stone