How to Wipe an Inaccessible Drive?

Hoping someone with Hard Drive expertise far beyond mine can offer some advice...
Is there a way to wipe -- or just scramble -- a seemingly "dead" drive, so that its contents (and in particular any personal information the drive may have contained) are rendered inaccessible?
This is the opposite of trying to recover data from an external FW drive that won't mount and can't be reformatted -- in this case I want to make sure that the data (which was only back-up material from an older system) is forever unrecoverable. But if I try to "zero the data" using Disk Utility, DU just gives up and says it couldn't do it because of read/write errors. Have tried accessing and/or repairing using DU, Disk Warrior, DriveGenius, and Data Rescue -- no luck. Have even transferred the drive itself to a different enclosure to see if I could get at it that way.
Since the drive (a LaCie 250GB d2, by the way) appears to be toast, should I simply remove it from its case and rub a strong magnet over it? Seems crude, but am stumped as to any better way -- or whether the magnet method would even work.
Any suggestions appreciated.
Thanks,
John Bertram
Toronto

Thanks for the feedback. I should've mentioned that the reason I wasn't considering obvious physical destruction (aka the sledge hammer technique) was that I'll be sending the drive back for an out-of-warranty trade-in discount on a new model.
In any case, I've subsequently learned that the old drive gets physically disassembled, with various parts recycled and/or safely scrapped. So the question's basically moot -- but I was curious to learn how sensitive modern external drives would be to consumer grade magnets; sounds like the answer to that one is: not very.

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