Have you ever considered the vast amount of sensitive data stored in your computer’s hard drive? If you are like most users, you have financial records, personal photos, passwords, credit card numbers and other confidential material saved on this physical component. When it comes time to dispose of old hard drives, you might erase the device or hire a professional to overwrite the existing files. You may even demolish the disk with a hammer or drill – or worse, throw caution to the wind and carelessly toss the drive into a garbage bin.
Even though you may feel confident in your data destruction methods, cyber-criminals, hackers and identity thieves know better. No matter how careful you are, these ineffective data destruction procedures can leave portions of your hard drive tracks intact, making your confidential data easy to recover and highly vulnerable to theft.
Why is Hard Drive Destruction Important for Businesses?
Proper hard drive destruction provides many benefits to your organization:
- Protects your confidential data: For business owners, your risk of a serious security breach increases exponentially each time an old hard drive is improperly disposed of. Hard drives are an enormous security liability since they store almost everything on your computer, including your operating system, software, client or patient data, financials, trade secrets and other confidential data. If you don’t use a trusted hard drive destruction method, you are putting your business, your clients and your reputation at risk for having your private information stolen.
- Ensures compliance with privacy laws: Just like you are diligent about hard copy media destruction with confidential correspondence, transaction records or reports, the information found on electronic media needs to be securely destroyed to remain compliant with government privacy laws. This includes old computer hard drives, but also other devices that you might not be aware of, like photocopier and printer hard drives, removable solid drives, disks and USB flash drives, CDs, mobile devices, magnetic tapes and more.
- Diverts electronic waste from landfills: Recycling of hard drives may sound like a safe and environmentally friendly data destruction solution; however, some recycling services resell old computers and hard drives for money or dump them into unprotected sites. When you opt for a hard drive shredding service, you have the peace of mind that all shredded materials are recycled and processed into recycled products or energy. Not only is this a sound environmental choice, but it also makes sure that your important data is safely destroyed.
How Do You Destroy a Hard Drive?
Hard drive shredding is the most effective way to ensure that your sensitive data is correctly disposed of. This type of destruction method physically destroys the hard drive using a heavy-duty shredding machine that is specifically built for electronic media. It works by completely grinding up and destroying every single part of a hard drive into small shards so that no section or tract is readable. With hard drive shredding, you can have full confidence that any private data left on your devices can never be recovered or stolen.
How Much Does It Cost to Destroy a Hard Drive?
Unlike regular paper shredders from the office supply store, a hard drive shredder is a heavy-duty, specialized piece of equipment that can cost anywhere from $11,000 to over $30,000. For the average business owner, purchasing a hard drive shredder for business purposes is not worth the cost. You would have to shred hundreds or even thousands of hard drives per year to recoup your investment.
A far more economical choice is using a secure media destruction service, like Blue-Pencil. We come to your office and destroy your hard drives in our shredding truck using a high-quality, professional-grade machine.
Hard drive shredding is an affordable solution, starting at $15 per device based on volume. If you have many hard drives to destroy, you can pay as little as $5 per device. This is by far the easiest, best, safest and most cost-effective way to destroy electronic media.
Securely Destroy Your Hard Drives with Blue-Pencil
You can rest assured knowing that your electronic media is securely shredded and properly disposed of with Blue-Pencil’s on-site, high-speed hard drive shredding services. Our state-of-the-art, professional-grade data destruction equipment uses cross-cut shredders, which instantly destroys hard drives and media to 5/8-inch in size so that your personal data can never be retrieved or reconstructed. This process is in accordance with the NAID AAA certification regulations.
Once completed, your company will receive an official Certificate of Destruction with scanned serial numbers of the hard drives that were destroyed. All shredded hard drive media will then be sent to a facility for material separation and environmental disposal. You never have to worry about your confidential data ending up in the wrong hands or a landfill.
To learn more about our hard drive and digital media destruction services, please contact us for a free quote.