Disposal and Recycling Outsourcing Concepts
If a media device is not being repurposed or recycled, physical destruction might be an appropriate disposal method.
A disk can be mechanically destroyed in specialist machinery:
- Shredding—The disk is ground into little pieces. A mechanical shredder works in much the same way as a paper shredder.
- Incinerating—The disk is exposed to high heat to melt its components. This should be performed in a furnace designed for media sanitization. Municipal incinerators may leave remnants.
- Degaussing—A hard disk is exposed to a powerful electromagnet that disrupts the magnetic pattern that stores the data on the disk surface. Note that degaussing does not work with SSDs or optical media.
Can outsource to third-party vendors for secure disposal
- should provide a certificate of destruction showing:
- make, model, and serial number of each drive they handled
- date of destruction
- how it was destroyed
- can use overwriting or crypto-erase and issue a certificate of recycling
A disk can also be destroyed using drill or hammer hand tools.
- safe for most cases
- not appropriate for the most highly confidential data
- risk of leaving fragments