Hard Disk Recycling and Data Destruction

All computers destined for reuse have hard disk drives removed and screened for size, type and age. Drives that pass are loaded into our drive destruction computers. Rejected drives are stripped of circiut boards and drive platters then crushed making the drive completely beyond use so that data can never be retrieved from the platters.

Reasons for this are:

• 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.

The British Government has guidelines for destruction of information retained on storage media as set out in document HMG CESG IS5.

• HMG IS5 Baseline - every sector over-written with one pass of randomly generated data
• HMG IS5 Enhanced (equivalent to US DOD 5220.22-M) - every sector 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.

If requested we can provide even more stringent methods of data destruction which exceed the 3 pass binary wipe but as they take longer there may be a charge

• US Department of Defence (DOD 5220.22-M ECE) - 7 pass random binary wipe
• Canadian OPS-II - 8 pass random binary wipe