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How to Dispose of Old Hard Drives

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A person taking a hammer to a hard drive with a Do Not Use Symbol aboveDIY Hard Drive Destruction

You will find an endless array of ideas on the internet of ways you can personally dispose of old hard drives. Some require chemicals or destructive tools, and most just require a lot of physical work. In most cases, you will still have to disassemble the outer structure to get at the disk platter.

Reasons People Turn to DIY

Many people assume that DIY hard drive destruction is the best way to go because they think they can:

  1. Save money.
  2. Save time.
  3. Make sure the information is destroyed.

The Sad Truth about DIY Hard Drive Destruction

You likely won’t achieve all of those intended goals with a DIY method, and you will still risk personal harm. Every suggested DIY solution comes with a caution, a safety issue, or a lack of guarantee of success. And at the end, you’re still left with material that needs to be recycled.

  1. The cost of having your drives properly disposed of is affordable, and far less that the possible cost of a breach of security if the information is retrieved by an unauthorized person.
  2. The time it takes to research the desired disposal process, obtaining the right tools, and accomplish the task will be far more than you bargained for. Also, if anything goes wrong, that will increase your time wasted.
  3. Being confident that your information is destroyed is one of the most important goals when disposing of hard drives. Not only do you need to protect your information, but any outside information that may be stored on that drive, whether they be family, friends, employees, or even business data from your workplace. Your legal obligation is the priority. Trying to erase your information doesn’t always guarantee it is unrecoverable.

Reasons to Consider Professional Hard Drive Destruction

  1. Trying to save a few bucks isn’t worth your health. Avoid injury by letting the professionals destroy your hard drives with industrial-strength equipment.
  2. It is imperative to follow the rules of protecting personally identifiable information (PII) by physically destroying hard drives to ensure their information can never be salvaged.
  3. Avoid releasing or disposing of dangerous toxins from mercury, lead, cadmium, polybrominated flame retardants, barium, lithium, or polyvinylchloride that may be present in your hard drives.

You may think shredding is primarily for paper documents, but Wiggins Shredding offers electronic destruction to businesses and residents in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Delaware. We also properly recycle the resulting materials so you don’t have to worry about it.

For more information, give us a call at 610-692-TEAR(8327) or complete the form on this page. Let us shred your hard drives safely and securely so you don’t have to risk a DIY mishap!

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