Over the past 30 years, Newtech Recycling has received many hard drives for disposal. Some of these drives had received (from their owners) extremely radical methods to ensure they could never be reread.
Some great examples include hard drives with nails hammered through them, drives that an axe has chopped up, and even hard drives soaked in buckets of water. The number of calls Newtech receives from businesses asking about hard drive disposal is too high to record. To help out, Newtech has listed below the top six digital data destruction questions and answers. Read on to learn how to kill a hard drive.
How Do You Truly Destroy a Hard Drive?
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 world’s most advanced hard drive-killing equipment. There are four stages to killing your hard drive.
First, each drive is purged using a British Intelligence (MOD) and US Department of Defense (DOD) level data wipe. This wipe involves rewriting 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 wipes the hard drive, resetting all the zeros and ones, and this process utterly blanks the hard drive’s 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 these services, and most Newtech clients 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 to be safe.
Does Newtech Look at the Data in Clients’ Hard Drives?
Newtech never reads or copies its clients’ hard drives. Apart from being under contract to guarantee your privacy, the data destruction process and the high levels of security make it a practical impossibility.
How Many Hard Drives Can Newtech Destroy in an Hour?
On average, Newtech destroys about 400 hard drives an hour, though that can be ramped up to thousands if needed.
How Do You Delete Computer Files Before Recycling?
This is one of the most common questions we are asked, and the answer is also one of the most interesting. If you delete a file from your computer and your ‘recycling bin’ folder, you haven’t deleted it.
All you’ve done is remove the directory path name that tells you where the file is. Over time, as your computer’s hard drive fills up with new files, your old ‘deleted’ files may get overwritten, but not always permanently.
Even if a file is overwritten, a shadow trace of it can remain enough to recover its 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 one or two hard drives to destroy, but if you have 20 or 30 drives, you might as well go for a more straightforward solution.
What is the Quickest Way to Destroy a Hard Drive?
Newtech recommends on-site data destruction as one of the quickest ways to destroy hard drives. Some consider this the securest data destruction method because 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.
Learn How to Kill a Hard Drive at Newtech
It is not expensive to destroy a hard drive at Newtech Recycling. 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 Newtech Recycling can be reached at 732-564-3110. We roll out the red carpet and don the white gloves, ready to help any company, large or small, with its digital data destruction. Give us a call and talk to us today!