If you have a simple-scan system that automatically enters the hard drives barcode into a tracking system, you get complete visibility into the history of your data erasure practices. While this method helps you keep track of every individual hard drives’ erasure, it still leaves the gap of keeping a real record of destroyed hard drives. Solid-state drives are not a form of magnetic media, so they can’t be erased similar to a hard drive. When deciding which hard drive degausser is best for your application, it is important to know the Oe level of the hard drives. You may know that it’s crucial to remove information from hard drives before disposing of them- but do you k…
Break the Hard Drive Physically
Read more about Nsa listed degausser here.
Why You Need HIPAA Compliant Data Destruction Services
When decommissioning clusters of machines in the past we have used a gas powered nailgun through the drives, making sure to catch the platters. Although degaussers are also certified by our local friendly security agency, they still use the above method internally . Hard disk was another matter, we took the platters out and sanded it down till we had bare metal. We used a belt sander for that, that does the job very quickly. The platters (and the read/write head – talk about paranoid) where then escorted to a specialized recycle company and melted down.
Although this process of course is simple in theory, in practice, the vast variation of media formats and magnetic densities makes the correct process quite difficult to achieve. Securis provides local hard drive shredding, electronics recycling, and data destruction. Degaussers work on hard drives in most of today’s devices, VHS tapes, cassettes, LTO and DLT tapes, and other storage devices.
How can one verify the success of the hard drive disposal process?
“I felt like I was in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, when he’s doing the mystery investigation for Pepe Silvia. Pictures on the wall and red yarn everywhere and nobody was understanding me.” Four teams sat at workstations set up like high school carrels. Sergeants sat before keyboards; intelligence analysts on one side, linguists and support staff on another.
Degaussing used to be the norm, but I am not such a big fan. On the plus side it is fast, you’ll normally just dump the disks on a conveyor belt and watch them get fed through the device.
Running an SSD through a degaussing machine will not destroy the device or the data on it. For destroying SSDs, shredding is recommended in order to physically destroy the device beyond the possibility of repair or recovery. Decommissioning hard disks can prove complex because of the combination of environmental and data protection standards involved.