There are several good reasons why you should be destroying your old hard drives. For example, many of the programs available for sanitizing a hard drive do not completely wipe the data from the drive. The software used may leave traces of data or just delete the directories leaving whole blocks of information behind. Also, hard drives with defective areas on the platter may have had data recorded in those areas prior to the defect. The data in those defective areas will remain after a sanitizing program is used. If the platter is left intact, that data could be accessed. There is also the threat of someone using reconstruction software on your old hard drive. This is software that will recover and restore any data left behind on a computer’s hard drive.

Our Method

Secure Shredding, Inc. is industry certified for hard drive destruction. Unless you opt out the serial number of each hard drive is recorded prior to destruction. After the hard drive is destroyed a certificate of destruction is provided for your records. We use a two-step method:

Step 1

We degauss the hard drive. This process electronically destroys any information that is digitally embedded into the charged surface of the platter. The hard drive cannot be reused after this step.

Step 2

We physically destroy the hard drive. The equipment we use renders the hard drive useless by bending the platter, crushing the read/write head and damaging the circuit board. After physical destruction, we ensure that your destroyed hard drive is disposed of in an environmentally safe and ethical manner.