We have a bunch of hard drives that cannot be wiped out due to hardware problems, so we are looking for a deivce to shred them. Any thoughts?

http://garner-products.com/PD-4.htm or http://garner-products.com/PD-8700.htm

The free option is to take the drives appart & break the platters.

Loki

... and in some countries, there are companies who offer a mobile shredding service - they have a truck (e.g. 3.5t size) with a shredder at the back. They drive to your premises and you can watch as the drives go in. It depends on your commerical decision about volume of drives to shred, cost of buying your own shredder etc. etc.

I heard that some of those companies also have a recycling scheme, for the different types of material in the shredded pieces.

thanks all,

breaking the platters does not meet our security requirements, plus we have 1000 unit to get rid of

we are also evaluating external company, but I was asked to check for a machine.

I was also looking at this deagausser:
http://www.datadev.com/degausser-ts1.html

Fo you think it's as reliable as they claim? It'a at the same price as the PD-8700, but does not destroy, only degausses. It says DoD approved, so I assume it should be as realiable as shredding the drive?

If you believe that the DoD has the best criteria, which I do not.

some machines


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wSQ2TKBLmw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u--SZDro ... pgf3dSf7xU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTm36fcYCOc



@Vulcan

You can also have a mobile shredder which they wheel into your office!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9s_2Y4xi5A

_________________
All went well until I plugged the drive in.

For that amount of drives it might be worth paying a specialist company to destroy them as they will also give you a certificate for each drive which has the drives serial number etc on it once the drive has been destroyed. Thats what the company I work at does

@ohliuw:

With any degausser, you are relying on either the machine's built-in testing (if any), or other measurements of the magnetic field, to ensure it was strong enough to wipe the drive. Can you trust them? Can you be sure that the operators will notice any problem? If the drives were faulty anyway, then of course you cannot test them afterwards to check for erasure, and in any case, that would not be a guarantee.

When my organisation was evaluating them, there were also concerns about how much leakage of the magnetic field there might be, outside of the unit. This could be important if the unit was used in any kind of office / lab / workshop environment , where "good" drives may also be present.

In the end, for faulty drives where erasure cannot be confirmed by re-reading (or for highly classified information), we opted for shredding after removing the PCBs - that way you can see the result. As loki says, reputable companies will also provide an audit trail of which disks have been destroyed, which is necessary for many organisations.

@guru:
Thanks

We crush all of ours with a non-proprietary product, can't remember off the top of my head what it is (off the clock currently and home), but we have very strict security requirements, so I would say crushing is good enough.