Re:Pfft. (Score 1)

Yes. To put it more accurately, if you can expose the magnetic surface of the platters to this kind of heat without exposing it to contaminants at the same time, then the platters will not be damaged. However, all the low-level formatting of the drive (esp. the servo tracks, which for the uninitiated are magnetic "lines" on the disk that the drive head uses to identify the location of data tracks for seeking purposes) will be irretrievably lost. To say "you still have a working drive" is misleading, as I guarantee that, should you put the disk back in your computer after doing this, it will NOT work. The same goes for degaussing the disk. If you could (low-level) reformat the disk, THEN the platters would be usable again. On a side note, though I've never tried putting a drive in an oven to see what happens, I've used an "industrial-strength" degausser on a disk before, and it gets HOT. However, I don't think it was at 700 degrees, and yet you could already smell the plastic parts cooking.