Don’t forget to protect your information when you are recycling! Here at the Reuseum we go through a number of procedures when handling devices that contain personal information. These steps comply to the (DoD) Department of Defense and the (NIST) National Institute of Standards and Technology’s standards. Additionally, our downstream recyclers are R2 certified. From media sanitization to physical destruction, we handle personal information seriously.
For both HDD and SSD, we make sure they are passed and verified through a series of wiping steps;
First we go through a 3-Pass Wipe, where software is used on the drive to overwrite all addressable storage and indexing locations with zeroes (0x00), complement (0xFF), and random characters. It is then verified.
Removable media follows a similar process for data destruction, with these devices also being erased through a 3-Pass Wipe.
If a drive fails to verify at either of the two steps, drives will then be destroyed at this one. Drives are placed inside a specialized machine where a conical punch delivers 12,000 pounds of hydraulic force to the drives, destroying its internal platter and shredding the hard drive chassis according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Special Publication 800-88 Guidelines for Media Sanitization.
If you are still unsure about our data destruction process, we are more then willing to remove the drives out of a given device. We can then provide you with the drives themselves so that you may destroy the drives to the conditions your looking for. DBAN, the software we use for wiping the drives, is available on their website and is free for personal use. For more information, you can visit their website through the following link at http://dban.org/.