In this day and age, being wary about the privacy of your data isn’t paranoid. It’s smart. If it’s time to send a hard disk drive to that big server rack in the sky, you need to make sure you aren’t leaving vulnerable files on the drive that some enterprising thief can pull off if they happen upon the discarded drive. 

Deleting all the files off the drive may seem like the way to go, but you aren’t done yet. Just because files are deleted doesn’t mean that they are gone forever. There may still be a record of them on the drive that a hacker could pull off.

One “handy” option is to pull the drive and give it a few good, hard smacks with a hammer. The impact will shatter the reading needle and will bend the circuit boards, forever corrupting the data. However, if you need to wipe dozens or even hundreds of hard disk drives for your company, there are more professional ways of going about it. Consider hiring a company that specializes in recycling hard drives. These companies will permanently destroy the data by rewriting over the drives and can even physically destroy the drives.

Need new hard disk drives? At Memory America, we sell wholesale hard disk drives and refurbished hard disk drives.