[rescue] Degaussing Drives?

[Bob Chu]

Hi,

Anyone out there know much about Degausing Hard Drives?
The Story is:
At my workplace, they need 30 or so Hard Drives low level formatted.
They delegated this task to me, however his would take forever
(considering I only work about 10 hours a week as a Student Worker, and 1
available SCSI card for me to do the task)  While walking around in the
Tech shop (Equipment/Electronics Maintenance) I bumped into an odd device,
that the Technicians told me is a Degausser used back in the 80's to clean
tapes (no one who is around now, actually seen it used) .  So I got the
idea perhaps this will work on Hard Drives.  But
before I begin, I just wanted to see if anyone knows anything about this
kind of stuff.  Will this permantly damage hard drives (ie. screwing the
motor up, Heads, etc).  How long do I need to leave a hard drive on it to
make the data on the drive corrupted?  The degausser has all sorts of
user put labels warning about fuse blowings after 4 mins of continuous
use, etc, so I assume its pretty powerful?  The degausser is a Apex Model
111, Cat no. 13634-01 in case anyones intrested.

Thanks in Advance,

Bob