How to Destroy a Hard Drive: Professional Destruction Services
When it first became popular to have computers in the home, you didn’t have to worry about destroying sensitive data on hard drives. Now that almost everyone has some form of computer, whether it’s a PC, Apple product, cell phone, copier or tablet, you can do just about anything on the computer, including banking and paying bills. Businesses allow you to access your accounts online, including medical accounts. Many people shop online and store their credit card information on a business’s servers. Thus, it is vital that you take hard drive destruction seriously or you could find your identity stolen. Hard drive destruction is serious business and should be taken lightly.
What to Do with Old Hard Drives
Hard drive crushing is one of the ways you could get rid of a hard drive. The point is to make the data unrecoverable. Even using data-wiping software doesn’t guarantee that your data is unrecoverable. You could learn how to destroy a hard drive with bleach, how to destroy a hard drive with a magnet or even how to destroy a hard drive with a drill, but of all of those methods, only the drill is 100 percent foolproof.
Destroying a hard drive with a drill or a hammer will prevent anyone from accessing the data, but you must ensure that the drive is smashed into small enough pieces or have enough holes drilled into the drive. With hard drives, the platters must be shattered into many small pieces so that it is impossible to put them back together again. When you drill holes in the hard drive, the force of the drill also bends the platters, so they are not able to turn.
A better way to make absolutely sure that a hard drive has been destroyed is to shred it, especially if the hard drive is a solid-state drive. Embassy Records Management and Destruction doesn’t just shred documents—we also shred hard drives, USB drives, and other digital media.
Hard Drive Disposal
Because of all the sensitive data on digital media, using hard drive destruction services is the best way to ensure that your data is not recoverable by anyone. If the information on a hard drive is retrievable, an identity thief would have a gold mine at his fingertips. Even if the hard drive is damaged and it seems as though you can’t access the data, someone with the right knowledge will be able to extract the data.
Computers have two types of hard drives; Hard disc drives (HDD) and solid-state drives (SSD). Hard disc drives use round platters to store information while solid-state drives use small chips to store information. Destroying a hard disc drive is easier than destroying a solid-state drive since you have to break the platters into many pieces.
Portable storage devices such as SD cards, micro-SD cards, DVDs, USB drives and SIM cards could contain sensitive data. You should destroy those just as you would destroy a hard drive. Putting any digital media through a shredder made to destroy these devices is the safest way to ensure your confidential data stays confidential.
Contact Embassy Records Management and Storage
Hard drive shredding is quick and easy. Just bring your old hard drives to Embassy Records Management and Storage or have one of our mobile trucks come to your location to shred your sensitive documents and your digital media.
We are the trusted local paper shredding company in Central Texas.
Give us a call any time at 800-717-1443.
Our Waco, TX address is 2100 Webster Ave. Waco, TX 76706.
Our College Station, TX location is at 6936 Old Jones Rd. College Station, TX 77845.
Our Round Rock, TX location is at 1000 Heritage Center Circle Road. Suite 363. Round Rock, TX 78664.