Hard drive destruction is essential when computer drives are no longer useful. Eighty percent of corporate laptops, and PCs, contain sensitive data, and the consequences of exposing that data could be disastrous. Organizations may either choose to perform hard drive destruction in-house, or to outsource the task to a reputable company.
Many hard drives contain sensitive personal information. This information may include names, physical addresses, e-mail addresses, and personal phone numbers. Drives may also contain personal financial information, such as social security numbers, credit card numbers, and account numbers. Additionally, many drives contain user IDs, passwords, and decryption keys. With this information, hackers may access other systems, or decrypt sensitive data found in databases, applications, or archives.
Hard drives may also contain valuable intellectual property. The presence of confidential memos and emails alone is enough of a reason to engage in hard drive destruction. Many employees also work with company trade secrets, and product designs, and leaking that data to competitors would be detrimental to the business. In addition, employee hard drives often store financial data, sales forecasts, customer information, and sensitive human resource information.
Unfortunately, the destruction of data only is not sufficient. People often think that reformatting the hard drive completely deletes data, but that is not the case. Formatting may fragment data, but it actually deletes less than one percent of a disk’s contents, and recovering those fragmented files, while complicated, is not impossible. Legislation in several states, as well as in Europe and Asia, requires all sensitive information to be either removed, or encrypted, before drives are retired or reused.
Complete hard drive destruction may be accomplished via four methods. These methods are physical destruction, degaussing, overwriting, and cryptographical sanitation. Each method has advantages and disadvantages, and requires varying levels of time, and expense.
Physical hard drive destruction renders drives completely useless. In this simple process, the drive is removed, and the entire drive, or the platters, are shredded. Most services or machines drill the drive in places perpendicular to the platters, and ensure that the drill penetrates completely from top to bottom. While waiting for destruction, equipment must be both gathered and stored in a secure facility, which may be both expensive and time-consuming. Also, hauling and dumping costs may also be significant, particularly for organizations with widely dispersed locations.
Physical destruction requires powerful, and expensive, machinery. For this reason, many organizations choose to outsource the task, to a company that will both haul and shred the drives, to save time. Physical destruction is not environmentally friendly, but it is effective, even for non-operation drives, and a good choice is drives are already going to be discarded.
Degaussing involves wiping a drive clean with a powerful magnet. The process requires expensive, specialized equipment, because the magnets have to be more powerful than those used to degauss floppy disks, or old tapes. Degaussing will not sanitize large numbers of drives in a short time, because the duty cycle of the machines is relatively short. Also, drives which have been degaussed will be non-functional, so reuse will not be an option.
Overwriting is another method of hard drive destruction. During this process, overwriting software writes a series of 0s and 1s over each location on the hard drive, multiple times. This process obscures previous information between layers of magnetic flux, and renders the drive unreadable. When the process is used by the United States Department of Defense, drives are overwritten at least three times prior to disposal, or reuse.
Overwriting is less expensive than destruction or degaussing. Also, drives subjected to overwriting may be sold, donated, or reused, which may save companies money. However, the process is also very time-consuming, and may not be practical for large organization which need to sanitize a large number of drives.
Cryptographic sanitation is both inexpensive and effective. This process is limited to disks that already encrypt data, at the moment it is written to a disk. When data is to be destroyed, the network administrator simply destroys the encryption key, instantaneously rendering data unrecoverable. Cryptographic sanitation saves time, and may be done remotely, so that drives do not have to be set aside in secure storage, prior to hard drive destruction. After sanitation, drives may be sold, donated, or redistributed, within the organization.
Organizations should take steps to secure hard drive data. Organizations should create, and train people to follow, a set of policies governing the wiping and destruction of every hard drive. Also, organizations should generate, and maintain, documentation, regarding every retired hard drive. Organizations should also transition to encrypting hard drives. Transitioning will allow cryptographic sanitation to be deployed for hard drive destruction, making it cheap to retire the drive when its useful life has ended. Also, encryption will protect data during the life of the drive, creating more security for the organization.
Some organizations handle hard drive destruction in-house. When drives are destroyed in-house, data never leaves the facility, which means that no loss is risked during transit. Also, data is destroyed by an organization’s own employees, and the destruction may be visually verified by supervisors. In addition, equipment requires minimal space, and no special wiring, in order to be operated. The potential cost savings associated with not having to pay for transportation and hard drive destruction, is definitely worth considering.
Other organizations outsource data destruction. Reputable shredding companies have trained and screened their employees carefully, to ensure accuracy and security. Also, outsourcing saves money on the purchasing, and maintenance, of expensive shredding equipment. Additionally, human resources may focus on the workings of the business, and not on destroying hard drives, to ensure maximum productivity.
Many state and federal laws require data to be guarded against disclosure, and no time limit is placed on the requirement to protect information. The loss of personal, or proprietary, information, could result in significant legal and financial problems. Hard drive destruction, by either physically destroying a drive, by degaussing, by overwriting, or by cryptographical sanitation, protects members and clients from the dangers of data leakage. Organizations should choose the hard drive destruction method which is most thorough, and cost-effective, for their needs.
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We also provide information on the following hard drive destruction and other services:
- hard drive wipe
- computer disposal
- hard drive eraser
- wipe hard drive
- computer recycling
- degausser