Keep your hard drive safe at home!

The linked news report is a good reminder why any storage media containing private data should never leave your door step. EVER!

Best Buy Resells Customer's Hard Drive Without Authorization
www.youtube.com...

This advice also applies about shipping a dead hard drive for replacement under warranty. I know you want a new drive for free instead of buying a new one, but don't fool yourself by thinking the bytes on the plate can no longer be read just because the motor failed to spin.

Then why don't you go a step further and store you personal info on an encrypted volume, in case a burglar try to take the hard drive from your cold dead hands. I had good experience with TrueCrypt thus far: www.truecrypt.org... Keep in mind this is strong encryption and impossible to recover if the partition ever happen to get corrupted. So... backup, backup, backup!