You want to do what to destroy your hard drive?

Are you wondering what motivates a person or company to get their hard drives professionally destroyed? After all, can’t you just run it over with your car, or just “delete” all the data? There are a lot of myths that many people believe about how you can remove data from a hard drive, and we want to make sure you don’t believe some of the most common ones.

 

If I wipe/erase/ delete it, no one can recover data off it (Myth 1)
Just because you “erase, wipe, delete” data off of a drive, it doesn’t mean it’s actually gone. You’ve just gotten rid of the place on the drive that tells your computer where the data is located. It’s like when you’re driving down the highway, and the exit to your house loses its sign. Just because the sign is gone, it doesn’t mean the exit is gone, and you’re no longer able to get to your house. There’s likely another way to get to your house, you’ll just have to find a new route. This is the same thing with the data on the hard drive. The data is still there after you’ve erased the marker telling your computer the data is there, but a hacker could still find the data on the drive. -Just like you’d find a different way to get home.

 

I’ll take it swimming with me (Myth 2)
Believe it or not, hard drives are fairly well sealed. So taking it for a swim with you or casting it out on a fishing rod into the ocean are unlikely to damage the hard drive to the point where data can’t be retrieved off of it. The data on a hard drive is stored magnetically on components called “platters,” so adding water to it is unlikely to affect the stored data.

 

I’ll just reformat it (Myth 3)
It would likely take someone who is nearly an expert to recover data off a reformatted hard drive, but it’s possible to access this data. A hacker with a little motivation and some data recovery software could recover pieces of data on a reformatted drive.

 

I’ll just swipe a few magnets over it (Myth 4)
Technically, Hard Disk Drives store data magnetically. However, a regular refrigerator magnet is not powerful enough to disrupt the bits and erase the data that is stored. Additionally, if your hard drive is a Solid State Drive (SSD), the magnet would have no effect on erasing data. In SSD’s, binary code is used rather than a magnetic field for storing data, so a magnet would have no chance of helping to wipe data off an SSD drive.

 

If you used one of these ways to previously destroy information on your hard drive, we would ask you to consider secure hard drive destruction through Shred Right. First of all, we securely dispose of your data by physically destroying the device that is holding it. Meaning, once we take your hard drive into our possession, we guarantee that none of the data on it will be able to be accessed again, and we track your hard drive’s progress as it goes through our destruction process.  You will also receive a Certificate of Destruction complete with a documented “chain of custody” all in one. Our secure destruction process meets or exceeds compliance requirements for everything from HIPAA to FASTA.

 

Once everything has been securely destroyed, we have a zero landfill policy. We follow our “GreenSmart®” final disposal guidelines.  GreenSmart® was designed to keep all of our shredded material out of area landfills and ensures your hard drives are properly recycled at a licensed facility. That means that no part of your hard drive will end up in the garbage. So instead of relying on water, magnets or the weight of your car to destroy your hard drive, get in touch with us to securely destroy it.