On-site Hard Drive Destruction Services in CT
WE PROTECT YOUR INFORMATION ON ELECTRONIC STORAGE DEVICES
Give us a call today to get an immediate quote and appointment to securely destroy your hard drives. We can come to your Connecticut location and shred or crush your hard drives as soon as tomorrow or any other date you prefer Monday through Saturday.
We Help You Protect Your Electronic Data
A single computer hard drive can hold more sensitive information about you and your business than all of your paper records. Even if you’ve “deleted” your files before disposing of your old computers, the data most often remains accessible to hackers and identity thieves. The only way to make sure your information doesn’t get into the wrong hands and give you peace of mind is to have FileShred physically destroy them. We are the trusted data destruction experts in the state of Connecticut & Springfield, MA.
How We Physically Destroy Your Hard Drives
FileShred’s hard drive destruction equipment is designed to destroy your hard drives so that data can never be recovered. Only the physical destruction will guarantee that your digital information is permanently destroyed. The irreversible destruction of your information on a hard drive can be accomplished with either one of these effective processes:
Hard Drive Shredding – Our industrial shredders cut your hard drives in multiple directions into small pieces. The process completely destroys the platter, the spindle, the read/write arm, and the actuator, making it impossible to recover any of your information. If you have a solid-state drive the shredding process will destroy the flash controller and the memory chips so the data can never be accessed again.
Crushing Hard Drives – Crushing means the hard drive is placed in our manual crusher where it bends and shatters the hard drive platter so that it is not possible to recover any information from the platter again.
The Hard Drive Destruction Process
We’ll come directly to your home or office in CT at your convenience, Monday through Saturday. The first step in hard drive destruction is to record the serial numbers of each device you’re having destroyed. Then, we use our industrial shredder or portable destruction equipment to destroy your data storage devices, making certain to render them 100% unreadable. You can watch the entire process, and we’ll even provide you with a Certificate of Destruction that includes a list of items you destroyed by serial number.
Whether you’re a homeowner seeking a bit more peace of mind or a large company seeking to comply with specific data destruction regulations, FileShred’s hard drive destruction service is perfect for you.
Destroying Solid State Hard Drives
A solid-state hard drive (SSD) is a type of data storage device that uses flash memory to store data. Unlike traditional hard disk drives (HDD), which use spinning disks to read and write data, SSDs have no moving parts. SSDs work by using an electronic grid of small memory cells to store and retrieve data. For this reason, SSDs need to be shredded or pulverized. Crushing is not enough.
Solid-state hard drives require a greater degree of physical destruction, like shredding or pulverizing. This should only be done by a professional data destruction service that has specialized equipment and follows industry standards and regulations to ensure that data is completely destroyed and the environment is not harmed.
The DON’TS of Hard Drive Destruction
Many people use at-home DIY methods that aren’t completely effective at erasing the confidential data and information that is stored on a hard drive. Some of the less effective methods we’ve seen to destroy a hard drive include:
Data-Wiping Software
There are hundreds of programs you can find online that make claims about being able to completely wipe the data off of a hard drive, but there’s no way to know for sure if they’re safe to use and 100% effective. Be wary of programs like this, as some of them are scams that just want to get access to the information stored on your hard drive!
Fire
While fire will certainly melt the interior parts of a hard drive, it may also cause harmful chemical fumes to emit from the valuable earth metals within the casing and housing once heated to extreme temperatures. To avoid this and the risk that comes anytime someone handles fire, we strongly advise against this.
Water
Contrary to popular belief, water itself is not harmful to data. Hard drives store information on small platters within the casing via magnetic storage, so water alone will not cause any damage to the data. There have even been cases of data being recovered from devices that have spent years underwater!
Microwave
Remember when your mother told you to never put metal in the microwave? That rule ESPECIALLY applies here. While microwaves do emit a small amount of radiation, it isn’t powerful enough to affect the internal mechanisms. Not to mention the fact that a hard drive in a microwave is a huge fire hazard.
It should be noted that there is no surefire way to make sure your data is completely erased unless the hard drive and the platters themselves have been physically destroyed by a professional. Resorting to other methods like the ones listed above puts your safety and security at risk, which is why you should leave it up to the professionals at FileShred who handle hard drive shredding and disposal on a daily basis. Let us provide you with complete peace of mind.
