Q:

Inexpensive degaussers or HDD shredders?

Apologies, I'll simplify my question: Are there any degaussers or HDD shredders out there in the $500-1500 range designed for use as such that you would recommend for low-volume use?

A:

We use an inexpensive drill press.  One or two passes and the platter is done.

A:

I could have sworn this has been asked before, but I can't find a close duplicate...
With only 10 disks to get rid of, you should do what I do: take the covers off and take the voice coil magnets out.  They're rare earth magnets and some of them are quite large, they make great fridge magnets, and are useful for lots of other things.  
If you want to be very, very sure no-one could get the data off, the first thing to do is to wipe the voice coil magnet over the surface of the platter you can see, which will mess up the servo tracks, making it essentially impossible to recover the disk.  (I have one magnet from an old DEC 1GB drive that is 1cm thick and can wipe a hard drive without taking the cover off.)
I usually stop at getting the voice coil magnets out, but for an HR machine I once took the platters out and broke them and disposed of half of the pieces at work, half at home.

A:

Thermite (be careful)

