Data Destruction and Media Disposal

A Safe and Secure Way To Permanently Delete Sensitive Data

On the other end of the spectrum, in addition to data recovery, we can also wipe media to the same standards employed by the Department of Defense, with a verified chain of custody and written affidavits confirming the procedure was completed. This process will completely eliminate all readable data from the platter surface. Once the data has been wiped, the platters will be destroyed so that no further recovery attempts can ever be made.

If you want to make sure your data can never be accessed again, we can work in batches of 50 drives or less at a rate of $199 per drive. This rate includes drive wiping, destruction, and secure disposal.  When you have extremely sensitive data, this is the only way to ensure that data can never be retrieved.

Why Formatting Your Hard Drive Is Not Enough

When you format a hard drive, you are essentially erasing the existing file system and starting fresh.  A format only overwrites sectors in the front end of the drive that contain file system specific data.

On the surface a disk format appears to completely wipe out the original data. When a hard drive is formatted you are left with all of your available space, and none of the old data is visible. Formatting however, is not a secure means of erasing data.

For example, if you have a 1TB hard drive that is full of pictures and documents, and you format it thinking you are erasing the data that was there, you would be wrong.  The data that was there before the format will still be recoverable…at least the majority of it will be.

The reason for this is, data is still able to be retrieved until the sectors containing data are overwritten.  Formatting a hard drive does not overwrite all of the sectors on the drive.

You need to make at least 2 passes, but 10 is actually the accepted standard on most hard drives.  In all honesty, it would be EXTRAORDINARILY difficult to recover data that has been overwritten once, but it’s better to go the extra mile and get as much as you can.