Secure Hard Drive and Data Destruction
In an increasingly digital world more and more data is being stored “in the cloud”. And for good reason: hard drives aren’t invulnerable and often fail. Hard drives contain delicate moving parts that are easily damaged from drops, overheating and humidity.
If your hard drive fails you might think it’s “dead” but in fact, it still contains valuable personal data that can be accessed by others. Re-formatting, erasing, wiping or tossing the hard drive into landfill is not ideal because you are risking revealing personal and business data.
What is Hard Drive Degaussing? And Why is it not Enough to Degauss your Hard Drive?
Hard drive degaussing is the process of permanently eliminating stored data on any type of ‘magnetic’ media, this includes hard drives, video tape, data reels or old style cassette tapes.
Inside your hard drive is a circular metal disk that has a fine coating of chromium dioxide or iron oxide. This disk is what your hard drive ‘writes’ on when recording data. If you open up a hard drive casing you would see a shiny metal disk with a series of fine lines, which make up the recording or data.
Typically, a degaussing machine permanently destroys all data on your hard drive disk by creating a strong magnetic field that erases or randomises the recorded data thereby destroying it. However, degaussing is not a foolproof or complete solution and doesn’t always work. That’s we always recommend the complete shredding and full physical destruction of the hard drive so that its material can also be destroyed and recycled.
Our Hard Drive and Digital Data Destruction Service
We can pick up your obsolete hard drives -- and in fact almost any type of e-Waste -- and bring it to our secure facility for destruction, and provide you with a detailed Certificate of Destruction afterwards. We can destroy digital data and physical hardware of a wide range of devices:
- Hard drives
- VHS or BETA video cassettes
- Old style floppy disks
- Magnetic backup tapes
- … All materials recycled where possible
For USB drives and Solid State Drives (SSDs) we recommend complete physical destruction. Please see our page on e-Waste Recycling.
Keeping your business, your business.®
Call 03 9460 9800 or email to get a free quote for your hard drive destruction needs.