Hard Drive Destroyers
The data security industry is moving in the direction of hard drive physical destruction for HDDs that have reached the end of their lifecycle and are being decommissioned. The ultimate data security combination is to degauss or erase a computer hard drive and then physically destroy it. However, physical disk destruction alone is enough to ensure, in most cases, that any information contained on the disk is irretrievable beyond recovery. If you would like to get rid of your old hard drives and don’t need to reuse them, a physical HD destroyer is a great option.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) writes in their Special Report 800-88 “Guidelines for Media Sanitization” that “destruction of the media is the ultimate form of sanitization. After media are destroyed, they cannot be reused as originally intended. Physical destruction can be accomplished using a variety of methods, including disintegration, incineration, pulverizing, shredding, and melting.” NIST rates physical data destruction with a “high” security categorization, whereas clearing or purging are given moderate and low ratings, respectively.
Hard Drive Crushers vs. HD Shredders
There are a variety of units available on today’s market at varying price points that employ various techniques of HD destruction, however the more commonly found units either disintegrate, shred or pulverize hard drives, rendering them useless.
There are hand-crank HD crushers that will mangle a hard drive with the turn of a crank, requiring no power, which is ideal for military applications in the field or for remote operations. Many of this type of crusher are also available with standard power, so you just pop the hard drive into the cavity and wait while the disk is mangled into pieces.
In many cases, once the hard drive’s data platter has been crushed, the disk and casing can be sold off to a recycler and stripped of its component parts. This is a nice way for a company or organization to recoup some of the costs from the decommissioned hard drive.
There are hard drive shredders available on the market that, similar to a cross-cut shred for paper, will shred your end of lifecycle hard drives into small shards of metal. As these units are enormous, they oftentimes are much more expensive than a unit that will simply crush the hard drive and its casing. The specific benefit of this type of machinery is that it can process hundreds of units per hour, so for a large corporation with centralized data destruction operations, this machine would be ideal.
Does Any HD Destroyer Destroy Any Hard Drive?
Most hard drive physical destroyers have a maximum physical dimensions guidelines for the drives they can accept. Be sure to inquire as to the dimensions of the drives accepted and ensure that the unit you’re purchasing will process all of the drives you need to destroy.
