House Cobra

Imagine how much damage you'll need to fix if your hard drives are stolen by cybercriminals. In addition to your customers losing their faith in your company, it would cost you thousands to millions of dollars to correct the issue. This is why you have to invest in proper destruction techniques for hard drives, such as shredding your hard drives.

Degaussing Hard Disk Drives

 

Degaussing hard drives is an extremely efficient method for sanitizing. In fact, it's effective enough that NSA has approved some methods of degaussing for high-security data destruction on magnetic media. Degaussers are basically magnetically tuned magnets which, in contact with other magnet media, such as hard drive destroyer they will erase the magnetic signature of any data stored. Degaussers that are magnetic are devices for destroying data can be measured in oersted. There are many things that determine a degausser's effectiveness, but in general the higher the ratings in oersted is, the stronger the degausser. There are many magnetic degaussers available and the prices differ greatly.

 

Disassembling Hard Drives

 

Disintegrators are data destruction equipment widely used in data destruction and recycling, to remove various kinds of metal. Hard Drive Disintegrators, like the Data destroyer 105 Hard Drive were designed to deal with the specific issues that surround hard drives. The knife milling technology employed by disintegrators for hard drives permits the hard drives to be continually cut into smaller pieces that can be passed through the screen. Although disintegrating hard drives is slightly slower than shredding them, it results in a finer residue and much greater security. A tiny amount of data is stored on a hard drive which could contain thousands of fragments. It is important to produce more destruction in the case of storage devices like hard drives.

 

Disassembling Hard Drives

 

Shredding hard drives needs a kind of shredder specifically designed for handling the thick chunks of metal that come with them. Shredders for hard drives employ steel cutting shafts made of hardened steel with widened gap sets, as well as conveyor belts with timers to stop overfeeding. The hdd destroyer shredder's remnants of shreds are not as fine as paper shredder. The shred residue produced by a hard drive shredder is comprised of huge chunks of metal. It differs based on how it hit the heads of shredding and may differ significantly between drives to the next. We generally recommend hard drive shredding for those who aren't trying to meet NSA or other government security standards. You could either run the drives through again, or use a hard drive disintegrator that leaves a less granular but more constant substance.

 

Destroying Hard Drives

 

The most basic method to sanitize information on the hard drive is physically destruction of the drive. Because many hard drives are made of reinforced aluminum housings and alloy platters physical destruction isn't always as simple as it seems. To help with the heavy lifting, specially-designed data destruction equipment has been developed. Common methods for physical destruction are drilling hard drives crushing hard drives, cutting hard drives, and breaking hard drives. The platters themselves aren't completely destroyed but the magnetic trail which contains information is destroyed due to the bending of platters. While physical destruction does not protect against all kinds of data recovery forensically, it protects hard drives from the most frequent digital data theft.

 

Erasing Hard Drives

 

The Hard drive Erasure method is the most common way of trying to sanitize the data on a hard drive. However, that doesn't mean it is always the best method. In reality, eliminating data from your hard drive does not erase any information It just moves it to another location on your hard drive. This misperception of way that "deleting" truly does its work is the root of countless instances of identity theft every year.

 

We suggest Secure Erase as well as other overwriting methods when erasing hard drives. Properly overwriting a hard drive can make the information stored on the drive irrecoverable, even with the latest in forensic technology. Standard software applications that perform multi-pass overwriting can take a long time to complete and could miss information on damaged sectors of the hard drive. Secure Erase is recommended because it doesn't depend on the BIOS configuration of your computer. Secure Erase will overwrite everything on the drive, including those with bad sectors. Since Secure Erase is built directly into almost all hard drives now days, it is many times more efficient than external overwriting software. Be sure to check out different data destruction equipment that make implementing secure erase a bit easier than more complex methods used by your IT personnel.

 

Reducing Hard Drives

 

For some security experts, a hard drive destroyer isn't considered to be destroyed until it's completely eliminated. In the last step of destruction of hard drives melting hard drives is typically utilized. Metal recycling facilities will accept old hard drives, and then melt them in a hot liquid metal vat. This method isn't possible to use with any equipment for data destruction. If you've seen Terminator 1, then you know the effects electronics can have when they are in contact with hot metal. This step is for high-security applications. It's the last in the declassification process because of the increased data exposure in the course of transporting and delivery to non-classified or unsafe areas.