1), destroying a hard drive makes recovery 'infeasible using state of the art laboratory techniques and results in the subsequent inability to use the media for storage of data.' Most of the standards that exist to erase a hard drive mention several ways to physically destroy one, including disintegration, grinding, pulverization, incineration, melting, and shredding. Just as there is no way to extract the written information from a burned piece of paper, there is no way to read the data from a hard drive that is no longer a hard drive.Īccording to the NIST Guidelines for Media Sanitization (800-88 Rev. Physically destroying a hard drive is the only way to absolutely and forever ensure that the data on it is no longer available.

If you don't, you risk exposing sensitive personal data that you previously deleted-data like social security numbers, account numbers, passwords, etc.Īccording to most governments and standards organizations, there are only three effective methods of erasing a hard drive, the best of which depends on your budget and future plans for the hard drive:Ĭould be dangerous without professional help. The most responsible thing you can do before recycling a hard drive, or even disposing of one, is to completely erase the hard drive. However, all the data is still there and, unless you truly erase the hard drive, can be recovered using special software or hardware. Remember that erase, delete, wipe, and shred are technically different terms. Since the OS can't see the data, the drive looks empty when you look at its contents. To truly erase hard drive data forever, you'll have to take some extra steps.Ī common way to 'erase' data is to format the hard drive, but you don't actually erase the drive of its data when you do this, but instead only erase the location information for the data, making it 'lost' to the operating system. If you want to completely erase a hard drive, it's not as easy as deleting everything on it.

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