There are many methods of hard drive destruction in the UK. These include destructive and non-destructive methods, whereby the storage medium can be re-used afterwards. Depending on the sensitivity of the data held on the hard drive and the level of security required for destroying the hard drive, some methods are preferable to others. 

For example, a business laptop containing access to vital employee and/or customer data (i.e. personally identifiable information), passwords and login credentials, should be thoroughly destroyed by a professional ITAD company using physical hard drive destruction. Less sensitive data that cannot realistically be used in a data breach can be destroyed by wiping the hard drive or through methods such as degaussing. 

Yes. Shredded hard drives are actually easier to recycle than intact hard drives because the many rare earth minerals and metals found within a hard drive have already been separated and can be sorted through with greater ease. Hard drive shredding is therefore an excellent, environmentally friendly method of hard drive recycling that reduces e-waste whilst also being highly secure. 

It depends. Most hard drives can be categorised as either HDDs or SSDs. HDDs use moving mechanical parts and magnetism to hold all data on a small disc called a platter. This specific component needs to be physically destroyed or exposed to powerful magnetic forces (e.g. degaussing) in order to destroy the data. 

SSDs have no mechanical moving parts required for data storage and instead use flash memory to read/write data. For these drives, the physical destruction of the entire hard drive ensures that all data is irretrievable. 

It may be possible to recover data, in whole or in part, from a hard drive that has been digitally shredded or wiped. Software applications that wipe hard drives can vary in quality and trustworthiness, with some leaving a trail that can be recovered with some IT knowledge and tools. The most secure and permanent way of ensuring that all sensitive data is completely destroyed is to leave the hard drive destruction to IT asset disposition experts.

Generally, physical hard drive shredding is a complete and thorough method of data destruction. A shredded hard drive is rendered into coarse 2mm pieces that would be immensely challenging to reassemble into anything meaningful. For added peace of mind, it is possible to shred hard drives into 0.5mm particles – essentially dust. 

No, deleting a file on Windows or placing the file in the Recycle Bin might help tidy up your workspace visually, but it does not destroy the data. Recovery of deleted files is fairly simple and requires no real IT skill, so it is certainly not a valid method of data destruction in the UK, especially for an organisation that must maintain data protection and data security. 

Although everyday magnets can scramble old floppy disks, a non-industrial strength magnet simply cannot exert sufficient force to scramble an HDD. Hard drive degaussers use powerful magnetic forces to destroy all data held on magnetic media such as HDDs without damaging the remainder of the storage medium. Degaussers are ideal for HDDs, but they are not suitable for the secure data destruction of SSD hard drives or other flash-memory-based media. 

There are many alternatives to hard drive shredding, such as crushing, punching, and acid melting. Although there are alternatives to physical hard drive shredding, most are seldom used as they are either far too costly and/or require far too much manual labour. Hard drive shredding equipment can consistently and reliably process multiple hard drives, conveniently on-premises or off-site at our Milton Keynes location as required by the client. 

Yes. While hard drive degaussing is only ideal for HDD and magnetic media, hard drive shredding is useful for all commonly used storage media including SSD hard drives and USB flash drives.