Computer Hard Disk Recycling and Data Destruction

When we recieve computers destined for Our services, we remove every hard disk drive and seperate them into SCSI, IDE and SATA. firewire and USB storage media are broken down to remove hard disk drives. Solid state media are crushed. CD and DVD disks are shredded and magentic tapes unwound and destroyed.

As part of our service, all hard disk drives removed from computers are first screened for size, type and age. Units that do not pass this section of the process are stripped of circiut boards and drive platters crushed. This yields the drives completely beyond use in any way. Data can never be retrieved from these platters.

Drives which meet our re-use category, whether they are from SUN, Windows, Macintosh, SGI or Linux based machines are loaded into our array drive destruction computers. The reason for this?

• Data security is paramount to financial, retail, medical, research, legal and other industries, where personal, client based and corporate information cannot and should not be released into the public domain.
• A single erase or simple delete of data on a storage medium will not remove the information that has been stored. Complete retrieval of the data is quite possible.
• Single binary wipes do not completely remove residual magnetic information from a hard disk drive or other media, allowing partial reconstuction of the original underlying data.

A number of governments around the world have recognised the need for data security and as a result, produced guidelines for the destruction of information retained on storage media.

Britain government guideline, set out in the document HMG CESG IS5 covers both baseline and Enhanced overwriting of data. At 'baseline' level the software overwrites every sector of the disk with one pass of randomly generated data. At 'enhanced' level every sector is over-written three times: first with a 1, then every sector is over-written again with a 0, and then every sector is over-written a third time with randomly generated 1s and 0s.

Our system meets the US Department of Defence (DOD 5220.22-M ECE) by providing a 7 pass random binary wipe to every storage medium that is not physically destroyed. Although less rigorous than the Canadian OPS-II 8 pass random binary wipe, this system, we believe is a highly stringent method of data destruction as it exceeds the 3 pass binary wipe employed in the standards: DOD 5220.22-M and the equivalent HMG IS5 Enhanced.