While it looks like a kitchen cabinet from the eighties, it’s actually a serious piece of kit, with a heavy-duty punch that makes mincemeat out of both 3.5in and 2.5in drives.

Duplo International delivered the machine to us with a bin full of already-destroyed hard disks in tow, but we had to give it a go ourselves. Sure enough, the 3.5in disk we dug up from the bottom of the Labs – an IBM Deskstar sporting a capacious 185GB – was soon rendered useless thanks to a punch that pierces disks with between 2.5 and 3 tons of force, as the following video demonstrates.

That’s enough power, according to Duplo, to theoretically lift a truck, so you can be sure it’ll put a rather large dent in the average hard disk.

It’s not the quick cut-and-shut process you’d assume it is, either – instead, the 0101 seems to enjoy its particular method of torture. Press the power button with a hard disk in the slot and, once it’s illuminated by a green light, the punch emerges from the side of the bay, slowing piercing its way through metal, silicon and glass, before retreating once the disk is destroyed.

Once that’s done, a flick of a switch drops the hard disk into an obsolete abyss. Or, more realistically, a bin in the bottom of the cabinet.

Of course, punching a hole through a hard disk doesn’t necessarily render the data destroyed – I’m pretty sure NASA would be able to retrieve it, for instance – but it certainly makes it incredibly difficult to retrieve any information without specialist equipment.

It’s a viable option for security-conscious businesses who need to ensure that data can’t be retrieved – and, as we’ve seen, it’s pretty satisfying to use, too. The catch? Well, that’ll be the price – £1,995 excluding VAT.

Would you shell out that much, or have you got a favourite – and cheaper – hard-disk destruction method? Let us know in the comments.

Just hours after the launch of the 3G iPhone, iFixit has already bought and destroyed one. I say destroyed, because I doubt they will be able to put it back together without at least a couple of parts being left over – it’s like flat-pack furniture.

The company sells accessories and replacement parts for Apple products, so the move makes sense, but it still fills me with jealousy.