I chose degaussing at first. this is so tricky, because the question is only referring to the actual media on the drive so inn this case it would be degaussing, but if the physical hard drive itself is what the focus was in the question, shredding would've easily been my first choice. UGH.

Benefits of Hard Drive Shredding: Your sensitive data is now 100% unrecoverable, so you don’t have to worry at all about hackers seizing your data. You can ensure your business is in compliance with regulatory requirements, avoiding fines and potential lawsuits. For personal computers, your data will be safely destroyed without the worry of identity theft For hard drive disposal, consider hard drive shredding services that can offer complete and total destruction.

What is the pros and cons of shredding vs degausser Pros: A degausser is good if you want to completely erase all audio, video and data signals from the magnetic storage. Cons: Degaussing is not entirely fool-proof. It can only be used on magnetic media, and there is no way to guarantee that a particular degaussing machine is strong enough to destroy all the data on every hard drive.

watch the youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wb3Xa1h_RqM you will see how hard drives are shredded

How in the world do you shred a hard drive?..a freaking metal box...and wipe the hard drive...with what? windex? and I don't even know what the hell sanitize the hard drive means..it is degaussing the hard drive (A degausser is simply a magnet that has a strong enough magnetic field to disrupt data on media storage units.)

Official CompTIA Sec+ Study guide: "Shredders are available for destroying CD and DVD media." I think compTIA makes a distinction between destroying HDDs and media devices.. Pulverizing for HDDs and Shredding for media devices (the question is talking about media). Its essentially the same thing, just different terminology for the specific object.

I've seen the same question and the answer was degaussing. How do you shred a hard drive?!

Degauss the hard drive. The same question asked before and has netter discussions. You cannot shred the hard drive. Degaussing guarantees the objective.

I've seen variations of this question where the answer flips from wiping to pulverizing, to shredding without any criteria that I can follow

Shredding/pulverizing is the best way to do this.