Hard Drive Data Destruction Services. What is the best way to permanently remove information from a hard drive? https://www.ict-itad.com/ITAD/news/articles/ITAD_006/article_about_digitial_hard_drive_destruction.html

How to Truly Kill a Hard Drive!

By Chris Keenan

Over the past 30 years ICT-ITAD.com has received a considerable number of hard drives for disposal.  Some of these drives had received (from their owners) extremely radical methods to ensure they could never be read again.  Some great examples have included; hard drives with nails hammered through them, drives that have been chopped up by an axe, and even hard drives soaked in buckets of water.  The number of calls Newtech receives from businesses asking about hard drive disposal is to high to record.  To help out Newtech has listed below the top 6 digital data destruction questions and answers:

Question: How do you truly kill a hard drive? 
Answer: For those companies that want the ultimate in data destruction, you’re going to love this.   Newtech runs a secure, CCTV monitored data destruction facility, that houses some of the most advanced hard drive killing equipment in the world.  There are 4 stages to killing your hard drive, each is pure 007 ‘Q’ Branch cool.  First, each drive is purged using a British Intelligence (MOD) and US Department of Defence (DOD) level data wipe.  This wipe involves a process of rewriting over old deleted files until there isn’t even a shadow trace left to recover.  Second, the hard drive is physically blasted with a Matrix style EMP.  This high-level magnetic field totally wipes the hard drive, resetting all the zero’s and ones, this process utterly blanks the memory. Third, just in case data has survived the purge and the EMP (which is highly unlikely) the hard drive is dropped into a specialized shredder, that turns the disk into flakes.  Finally, those flakes are melted down and the alloys and plastics are recycled.  You’d have to be pretty paranoid to use all of these services, most Newtech clients just choose the EMP and shredding options.  That said, Newtech has clients in the medical, pharmaceutical, finance & legal industries that order the ultimate disk killing service, just to be safe.  

Question: Do you ever read or look at data held on your clients’ hard drives?   
Answer: Newtech never accesses data, reads or copies its clients’ hard drives. Apart from being under contract to guarantee your privacy, the process of data destruction combined with the high levels of security make it a practical impossibility.       

Question: How many hard drives do you destroy an hour?
Answer: On average, Newtech tends to destroy about 400 hard drives an hour, though that can be ramped up to thousands if needed.

Question: How do we (the client) permanently delete files from our hard drives before Newtech destroys them? 
Answer: According to ICT-ITAD.com, this is one of the most common questions asked.  The answer is also one of the most interesting.  If you delete a file from your computer, and then from your ‘recycling bin’ folder you haven’t actually deleted it.  All you’ve done is removed the name of the directory path that tells you where the file is.  Over time, as your computers’ hard drive fills up with new files, your old ‘deleted’ files may get overwritten, put not always permanently.

Even if a file is overwritten, a shadow trace of it can still remain, which can be enough to recover the files content.  There is specialized software that can permanently delete files & data from your hard drive but using it tends to wipe the entire hard drive and it can take some time to run.   This is fine if you have 1 or 2 hard drives to destroy, but if you have 20 or 30 drives you might as well go for a simpler solution.     

Question: What is the quickest way to destroy hard drives? 
Answer: Newtech recommends on-site data destruction as one of the quickest ways to destroy hard drives.  Some consider this to be the securest method of data destruction, mainly because the hard drives never leave your location.  Usually, on-site data destruction involves an IT hardware engineer arriving at your premises with a mobile hard drive shredder.  The engineer will then catalog and shred each hard drive with you.

Question: How much does it cost to destroy a hard drive? 
Answer: Having your hard drives shredded isn’t that expensive, in fact it’s a lot less than you think.  If the hard drives need to be removed from the computers this can add to the cost, but it’s still very reasonable. For the most up-to-date prices, the team at ICT-ITAD.com can be reached on: 732 564 3110.  However, the real question you should be asking yourself is, what IT hardware carries hard drives that you don’t know about.  It’s not just laptops and computers that store data.  Photocopiers also use hard drives as do phones, some printers & of course things like optical disks (CD’s & DVD’s), USB sticks, flash cards, solid state drives, tablets and tapes are also subject to data destruction laws.  Don’t worry too much, ICT-ITAD.com rolls out the red carpet and dawns the white gloves, ready to help any company, large or small, with their digital data destruction requires.