How to Dispose of Old Computers and Hard Drives?

At some point, you may need to destroy data on your hard disk. This may be due to a number of reasons, some of these reasons maybe you want to donate a computer that once held your very sensitive data or the computer is obsolete and you now want to get rid of it or perhaps the computer is damaged and you have found a replacement so you will no longer be using it. 

For whatever reason always ensure that before you destroy data on your old hard disk you must ensure that a copy of that data is safely backed up in a different location. Failure to do that you may never get it again. This review gives an overview of the best practice to consider when you want to dispose of your hard disk drive. As a matter of fact, getting good advice about different hard drive destruction techniques is important for all computer users.

Tips and Methods to Apply

Physical Technique

This involves the generation of surface deformations that is in excess of 0.001 inches. This is a cheap method to ruin data on a hard disk. Physical techniques may include several methods for destruction. It is usually done by a computer expert.

Another good method that completely destroys data is by cutting the disk surface using a thermal method. The cutting involves destroying all tracks of the magnetic disk using thermal heat.

Shredding

It is the most common method used commercially by large companies. It involves shredding the disk’s circuit board into tiny pieces. During this process, the flash memory printed on the board is usually destroyed so that no data can ever be reconstructed.

Drilling Method

This is a physical method of perforating holes on the hard disk to destroy it completely. The hole is manually punched on the disk using any sharp object such as a nail and a hummer or masonry bit. Doing this makes the disk unusable as it is damaged beyond repair.

Use of Boot Disk

It can either be open sources downloaded on the internet or purchased or supplied with a computer to use during reinstallation of the operating system. This software normally destroys the contents of a hard disk. However when using this method caution must be taken as it doesn’t completely wipe out the data, that is to mean that there is data recovery software that can be used to restore the data. Using this method may require some technical knowledge in order to reinstall the operating system as it loses its file system, therefore, making it tricky for it to pick a new operating system.

Physical Heating of the magnetic media

This can also be done to deform the shape of the hard disk and at the same time destroying the underlying data. Thermal destruction should not be done on a disk that is to be reused. This is because the high temperature completely destroys the disk.

Bottomline

There are many people out there who provide hard drive destructive services such as Rubbishtaxi. You can always seek their services instead of troubling yourself just in case you are not very conversant with this task.

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