Why stockpiling hard drives screams opportunity for secure data erasure

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“Nearly half of all companies are stockpiling old hard drives.”

That means that over half of companies are discarding hard drives somewhere, somehow.

That’s a quote from a recent IT Business Edge article I read titled “Old Storage Devices Are Prime Security Risk” by Sue Marquette Poremba.  In the article, Sue talks about how nearly half of all companies are stockpiling old hard drives. I can just imaging some shelf in some back room with boxes upon boxes of hard drives in them, and hard drives with data on them mind you.  I personally went through and cleaned out my basement of old PCs and peripherals, opting to hang on to the hard drives because I knew I probably had personal data on them, and sending the rest to the recycling bin.  Over the years, I have accumulated 12 drives. I can only imagine what a corporation or data center accumulates on an annual basis.

January 28th was the International Data Privacy Day.  A day dedicated to raising awareness around “the protection of digital data, and as technology evolves and cybercrime increases, this is now more crucial than ever. When company hardware is not properly discarded, information is left vulnerable to recovery and potential security or privacy breaches can occur.”

In past posts, we’ve talked about how many hard drives leave data centers worldwide each day and how features like Instant Secure Erase can eliminate any risks of “data on the loose” from drives not properly discarded.  But, data centers are not the only entities that are at risk.  Think about the fact that over 80% of households in the US have computers. Considering there are roughly 118 million households in the US alone, that’s 94 million hard drives heading towards retirement someday. Not to mention the number of hard drives accumulated over the previous years. The numbers are quite staggering.

The question being, where do these retired hard drives end up?

Sure data centers either hang on to them or have them shredded.  I would guess not many homeowners know to hang onto their drives and secure them, nor want to dish out the cash to have them destroyed. So they end up somewhere (hopefully recycled).  Like data centers, consumers should not be taking risks when it comes to drive replacement.

I predict there will be a day when all hard drives have a built-in feature like Instant Secure Erase as a standard. It would be even greater if the operating systems guys got in on the value of protecting consumers and data centers alike, and built such drive erasure features right into the system.

No doubt there are ways to erase all of the data on your drive, but take note, not all are that foolproof, so choose wisely.

Do you have a drive stockpile at home?

Security Resources:

Storage Effect Blogs on Security
Inside IT Storage Blogs on Security
Seagate.com/security
Seagate Secure Enterprise drives