Clean Disks with Hard Drive Eraser

When computer hard drives have reached the end of their life-cycle and are to be decommissioned, it is necessary to sanitize the resident data on these storage devices beyond recovery. The use of hard drive erasing software offers many advantages over competing methods, such as degaussing or physical destruction.

The degaussing method involves subject the disk platters to strong magnetic fields of alternating current to obliterate the data. However, major disadvantages are apparent. First, the drive must be harvested from the computer, which is labor intensive and in most cases, cost prohibitive. Secondly, this process renders the drive obsolete, preventing its sale, return or future deployment. Third, the use of such strong magnetic fields can present an unacceptable risk to those with pacemakers or other heath-based mission critical devices, and finally, there is no option to produce a log file from this process to verify its success or document the hardware for auditing and compliance.

Physical destruction also entails the costs of obtaining the target drives. As this destruction process is almost universally performed at a third party location, the drives are at considerable risk from leaving your secure parameter. The drives could be lost, hijacked or stolen prior to reaching the shredding facility. Regardless of circumstance, the owner of the data remains its steward, and as such, responsible for resulting criminal penalties and civil sanctions. As in degaussing, there is not a detailed log file report available for verification, auditing and compliance.

The use of hard drive eraser technology offers many advantages. First, it is extremely cost effective as it is not necessary to harvest the drives from the target machines. The process will produce detailed log file reports that can verify not only its success, but include the hard drive serial number, erasure method used, times, dates, errors (if any) and other information. Importantly, the sanitization process can be performed in-house utilizing staff holding the required security clearance.

CyberScrub’s hard drive eraser solution for cleaning hard disks is cyberCide . It can be run locally or over a network. This product may be fully automated, will run from command-lines, and utilizes erasure methods to meet your most exacting requirements (secure deletion methods exceed national defense standards, including US DoD 5220.22).Volume discount pricing and site licensing models are available.

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