Nothing lasts forever, but it would be nice if hard drives lasted a little longer. The hard drives that power your business’s electronics and store all your data generally have a life expectancy of around five years, depending on the model; sometimes they start to fail even earlier. Considering how many computers and external drives the average business owns, destroying these drives is something that’s going to come up a lot. Every business needs to have a go-to method for the secure disposal of its obsolete electronics.
So what is the right way to destroy hard drives? Is hard drive shredding the only effective option? Or can you hit them with a sledgehammer… hold them near powerful magnets…toss them into water? A quick Google search will yield all sorts of DIY strategies that *might* work, depending on your goals. Some hard drive destruction methods will damage a drive enough that your computer can no longer read it. That doesn’t mean the data is really destroyed, though. Thieves know that businesses’ electronics are a rich source of sensitive data. They’d love to access the information on your old drives, and they have advanced techniques to recover any valuable data stored on them.
Hard Drive Destruction Methods and the Law
You may be free to destroy a hard drive from your home computer however you’d like, but businesses have legal responsibilities around secure data destruction. There’s a network of data disposal laws that may affect your specific business. Any organization that’s a covered entity under HIPAA is subject to its data disposal guidelines. The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) may apply to American companies if they process data belonging to European residents. Then there are the dozens of state laws governing data disposal, including here in Massachusetts.
All the laws governing data security and secure data disposal are a little different, but they all basically boil down to the same message: Businesses must safeguard all the private data they collect from other people, all the way through the data destruction process. It’s every company’s responsibility to maintain data destruction compliance for both paper documents and digital information stored on hard drives. They must be securely and permanently destroyed when those records and hard drives are no longer needed.
Destroying Hard Drive Disks vs. Destroying Solid State Drives
Hard drive disks (HDDs) used to be the standard way most of our devices stored data. In recent years, solid state drives (SSDs) have surpassed them in popularity. (A 2023 survey by EaseUS of more than 200,000 people found that 45.94% of respondents were using SSDs, compared to just 26.63% who were HDD users.)
People like SSDs because they’re faster and more durable than HDDs. Those differences are due to the way SSDs store data. Standard hard drive disks store data on magnetized platters that look like CDs. A small arm reads the data as platters spin. Solid state drives store data on a series of connected flash memory chips. There are no moving pieces and no magnetic properties. These differences make certain destruction methods more effective for HDDs than SSDs.
FAQs About Hard Drive Destruction Methods
Can drilling/fire/water destroy hard drives?
DIY physical destruction tends to be the least effective and most dangerous way to get rid of hard drives. Drilling holes into a drive, attacking it with a hammer, burning it or submerging it in water won’t necessarily destroy the data stored inside, especially if it’s an SSD. Every chip inside the drive can store data, so an SSD isn’t truly destroyed until every chip is destroyed. Any method that involves drilling, fire or water may not be compliant with HIPAA and other relevant data security laws, unless the drive is completely destroyed.
Can magnets destroy hard drives?
Using powerful magnets to wipe data is a popular suggestion for destroying hard drives. Called degaussing, this strategy can work… in theory, at least. Degaussing is only a viable way to destroy an HDD. (Remember, SSDs don’t use a magnetic field to store data.) It also requires a much more powerful magnet than most of us have access to. Conventional wisdom says a magnet must have at least 450 pounds of force to work for degaussing. Businesses that elect to degauss obsolete drives should probably pay a professional service to do it, rather than attempting a DIY effort.
Can overwriting or wiping data destroy hard drives?
Maybe? Wiping a hard drive can be user-friendly; you can theoretically destroy all your business’s sensitive data without leaving the office. There are a bunch of online tools and programs for HDDs that claim to be effective at wiping data or writing over it with 1s and 0s so the original data is inaccessible. Some SSD manufacturers provide tools for erasing data from their drives. Or, users can use third-party programs like Parted Magic to wipe SSDs, if they’re willing to pay.
Again, the problem with all of these strategies is that you’ll never really know if your efforts worked. Sometimes people might choose erasing or overwriting the data so they can resell the “empty” drive. This is a very risky choice when your drives contained sensitive information related to your business, if any of that data can be recovered by the next owners.
Can shredding destroy hard drives?
The answer to this one is probably obvious: yes. Ripping a drive into tiny pieces of metal confetti is a permanent way to destroy any data that was stored there. A powerful commercial shredder can tear through the metal platters in HDDs and the memory chips in SSDs so there’s nothing left that would have any value to data thieves. Shredding is also convenient because is accomplishes both the destruction of your sensitive data, and the actual disposal of your physical drives. Your hard drive shredding service can take care of recovering any recyclable material from the drives and sending everything else to the landfill.
Need Help Shredding Hard Drives in Massachusetts?
Don’t take chances with magnets and other DIY ways to destroy hard drives. Let Northeast Data Destruction shred your old hard disk drives and solid state drives so you have absolute confidence your business’s private information is destroyed. You can even witness the shredding at our NAID “AAA” certified facility, and we’ll provide a Certificate of Destruction for your records.
What questions do you have about hard drive shredding? I’m happy to help—contact me today!