Hard Disk Degaussers

We use “The Terminator”……sounds silly, but – we also wind up selling the ground up bits for $.50 - $.60/lb……who would have thought that shredded hard drives are worth more ground up than in one piece….??  And – they are disposed of through a certified recycler……very “green”…..

Thanks,

Michael

Paul,

Hard drive destruction is handled by our university’s surplus property department. They use a hard drive shredder that works well (it replaced a drill press), but can’t destroy small storage media like SIM cards and SD cards. My previous university used a manually powered hard drive bender, which was also effective and about 1/3 of the cost. In a past environment I discovered a degausser that was in use, but when my office tested it we discovered that it wasn’t functioning properly. When we tested a processed hard drive all of the data was still accessible. As a result, we abandoned use of degaussers in favor of destructive alternatives which were easy to verify the effectiveness of visually.

If you’d like more info, feel free to contact me directly.

We just got one of these which is doing a very good job.   http://www.semshred.com/manual_hard_drive_crushers

Contact me off list if you want a picture of what this thing does.  They also have a powered one. 

The manual one does need to be bolted to something, but it can destroy a hard drive in 5-10 seconds depending on the a variety of factors.

HI All,

Sorry for hi-jacking this thread, but can anybody tell me what they do (If anything) to document the sanitization of hard-drives? Once they are removed from the PC (Which is what is usually tracked in the asset inventory) how do you track the hard-drives to show they have all been through the degausser?

Or do you?

Thanks,
Dan

Our form is http://main.uab.edu/Sites/it/documents/80781.pdf which is then batched and taken off site for shredding and/or incineration (tape media).

+1 to Steve Werby.  Degaussers don’t give you a visual indication they didn’t work.