FDE will mean less crushing and more re-using of disk drives
The Minneapolis Star Tribune profiled two local companies that have thriving businesses destroying retired disk drives. The process is startling similar to the metal crushers used in junk yards.
If you had any doubt that erasing data from a drive doesn’t really erase it, read this article.
Video of a drive shredder in action
Seagate will ship about one billion disk drives in the next five years. Imagine if they all had to be crushed and recycled when they are retired? Or worse yet, thrown in a junk pile somewhere?
An exciting feature of the industry’s new Full Disk Encryption technology is that drives can be erased with absolute certainty by simply deleting a password. That means that still-functional retired drives can be resold as “gently used” drives.
Make room next to that used car lot!
FDE is currently available on notebook drives like the Seagate Momentus FDE, and it will be coming soon to servers and storage systems near you.
When you get rid of a drive, do you erase it, crush it, or cross your fingers? Let me know!
I’ve always relied on unix’s “dd” command for this. I’ve never had a problem with drives that once contained sensitive data after wiping it with this very old and very functional command 😛
That said, when I have done work for customers in the past, I’ve always given them the hard drive (or drives) that I had done all the testing on. It was usually written into any contract where I was asked to sign a NDA.
[…] Blocks and Files highlighted this very physical solution to a data management problem: how to be sure sensitive Info Remnants on retired disk drives don’t ever again see the light of day. A manual version of industrial disk crushers. […]
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[…] Blocks and Files highlighted this very physical solution to a data management problem: how to be sure sensitive data on retired disk drives never again sees the light of day. It’s a do-it-yourself version of industrial disk crushers. […]