How to Securely Dispose of Hardware Like Old Hard Drives and Disks
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Safely disposing of old hardware, like hard drives and disks, is crucial for protecting sensitive information from unauthorized access. Simply deleting files or reformatting a hard drive won’t completely erase data. Specialized tools can often recover it. This guide shows how to securely dispose of hard drives. It covers effective data destruction methods to prevent sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands.
How to Securely Dispose of Old Hard Drives (Best Method)
Digital wipe methods can sometimes leave recoverable traces, making physical destruction essential for total data security. When securely disposing of hard drives, prioritizing data protection is critical.
One example is degaussing, also a purge-level sanitization, which exposes your hard drive to a magnetic field of ample power to purge all traces of your data on the enclosed magnetic media surface. This may destroy the data, but it will also destroy your hard drive. In addition, it is a costly technology that requires operator training and frequent audits of the processed devices.
With paper you can just shred sensitive information, and the same principle actually applies to hardware. There are industrial shredding and disposal sites that will physically destroy your hardware for you. This is called destroy-level sanitization. It guarantees complete destruction of data when done correctly, ensuring no recovery efforts can reconstruct it. However, it also results in the total destruction of your hardware.
Decommissioning hardware offsite exposes your data to risks and may violate security and confidentiality regulations due to a lack of automated audit controls. Furthermore, it may not align with environmental disposal regulations, which could lead to hefty fines. Although responsible waste management in eco-friendly landfills is costly, failing to comply with these standards can be more expensive in the long run.
When to Dispose of Hard Drives
Your company may need hardware disposal or data decommissioning for several reasons. Perhaps your records are scattered across multiple systems, and consolidating hardware will cut maintenance costs. Or, following a merger, you may have surplus hardware with redundant applications and data.
Whatever your reason to do so may be, below are some of the most secure hardware disposal steps that you can take to decommission your data and hard drive.
How to Save Hardware For Later Use
By using clear technology (software-based) or purge-level sanitization, you can decommission your data while leaving your hardware intact.
Clear Technology
Clear technology uses multiple overwrite patterns to obscure data storage locations, but it doesn’t fully decommission data. While it confuses the system, it fails to eliminate recoverable information from blocked sectors or tracks. As a result, data can still be retrieved using common reconstruction tools or advanced laboratory methods.
Purge-Level Sanitization
Purge-level sanitization eliminates data from all storage regions on the media surface beyond laboratory reconstruction efforts.
An example of “clear technology” is Secure Erase.
This is actually an embedded function in your hard drive that can render the processed device devoid of any data in all storage regions of the media surface. In addition, this also preserves the hard drive and allows it to be reusable.
You might think that this would be an extremely slow process, but it is actually pretty fast. If you are wondering how to securely dispose of a hard drive, this is the go-to method. It can purge 100GB of storage in 17 minutes, making it one of the fastest decommissioning processes out there.
Compliance or Regulatory Considerations
The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) formulated guidelines for proper media sanitization and information disposition. They determined that software-based (clear level) technology is not an effective means for decommissioning hard disk devices of data.
Special Publication 800-88 states that proper decommissioning requires purging technologies. Both the NIST and NSA strongly recommend using Secure Erase, which the NSA helped develop.
Why Get Rid of Hard Drives
Sometimes companies need to decommission data because they have run out of internal storage space and now require some in-house cleaning.
Hard drives have a very limited amount of storage space, and it can fill up quickly, leaving you with some tough decisions to make. Cloud storage options can offer easy storage of your data in a secure location without having to worry about the space available.
The cloud will eliminate any need to go out and purchase new hardware for storage purposes.