Went to a recycling center and had a total lightbulb moment about hard drives

I dropped off old monitors at the county e-waste facility near Akron last Tuesday and saw a literal mountain of hard drives just sitting in a bin. The guy told me they don't shred anything, they just wipe them with a magnet and toss them in a pile. How do you guys handle clients who don't want to pay for proper data destruction but still expect you to guarantee nothing leaks?

2 comments

2 Comments

terry_jones16d ago

Three years ago I was the guy telling clients a degauss was good enough for their old hard drives. Then I actually bought a used drive from a recycler for 12 bucks on eBay and pulled thousands of tax returns and medical records off it with free software in about 40 minutes. That changed my whole view on this. Now I tell clients straight up that a good wipe costs less than a data breach lawsuit and I won't touch their drives unless they pay for shredding. The cheap route just shifts the risk to you and that's not a gamble I'm taking anymore.

thomas_martinez15d ago

The drive you bought probably still had original partition tables intact too, which is scary. Most people don't realize that degaussing only works for certain drive types and densities. Try running a degausser on an HGST 10TB helium drive and see what happens. The field strength required goes way up as platter density increases. That's why the NSA uses physical shredders for anything above 4TB now.