IT Security – Hard Drive, Data Carriers, Digital And Optical Media Destruction, Sanitization

Every office has its own computers and storage media which contain important business data.

From SME to large organisations, all offices at some stage will need to use a hard drive digital media shredder to protect their very sensitive and confidential information. Hard drive digital media shredders are very safe and reliable, being a user-friendly and convenient way to protect your data by sanitizing these digital media carriers.

Companies want be sure that information is safe and free from any data breaches and prevent it from being stolen, copied, and so on. Hard drive sanitization and digital media shredding is so critical in protecting your companies outflow of information.

Hard Drive Digital Media Shredders can handle all kinds of configurations, shapes, and sizes of computer parts and destroy them into unrecoverable, unrecognizable pieces of scraps, with total obliteration of the media structure, data and file contents. Being physically obliterated into smaller fragments prevents data extraction, copy and reconstruction.

Degaussing Machines use state-of-the-art methods to degauss all digital media.

Data is stored in the magnetic media, such as hard drives, floppy disks, and magnetic tape, by making very small areas called magnetic domains change their magnetic alignment to be in the direction of an applied magnetic field. This phenomenon occurs in much the same way a compass needle points in the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field. Degaussing, commonly called sanitization or erasure, leaves the domains in random patterns with no preference to orientation, thereby rendering previous data unrecoverable. There are some domains whose magnetic alignment is not randomized after degaussing. The information these domains represent is commonly called magnetic remanence magnetization. Correct degaussing guarantees insufficient magnetic remanence to reconstruct the data after sanitized.

Erasure by the degaussing method is performed two ways: AC erasure, or DC erasure, the medium is saturated by applying a unidirectional field (i.e., DC powered or by employing a permanent magnet). A degausser is a device that can generate a magnetic field for degaussing magnetic storage media.

For some methods used for computer data storage, such as modern hard drives and backup drives, degaussing converts the magnetic media totally unusable and damaging the storage system. Due to the hardware having an infinitely variable read/write (head positioning) mechanism relying on special “servo control data” that should be permanently embedded into the magnetic media. Servo data is written onto the media a single time during manufacture using special-purpose servo writing hardware.

Normally servo patterns are never overwritten by the device for any reason and are used to exactly position the read/write heads over the data tracks on the media, to compensate for sudden vibration frequencies & device movements, thermal expansion, or changes in positioning. Degaussing indiscriminately removes not only all the stored data but removes the servo control data. Without the servo data, the device can no longer determine where data is to be read/written on the magnetic data storage medium.

Media Destructors/Disintegrators, unlike hard drive digital media shredders and degausers, reduce the partice size which is re-destructed until the particles are small enough to pass through a screen with holes sizes that determine the particle size and security level.

Using NSA Approved Destruction Equipment published in the EPL (evaluated products list) is usually an assured and tested option for the destruction of the above data carrier types.