Is hard drive destruction service necessary for me? How do I destroy hard drive? In this post, MiniTool will give you answers. Just keep reading to get them.
Why You Need to Destroy Your Hard Drive?
With the development of storage technology, hard disks have been widely used in devices including computers, printers, etc. Nowadays, more than 90% of information is stored on hard disks.
A typical home desktop computer or laptop hard drive can contain your social security number, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and website logins and passwords. Even if you have deleted or formatted the information, you still can’t ensure that the data can’t be recovered by others.
If the hard disk containing sensitive information is stolen, there is the risk of the information leakage, so it is necessary to destroy the hard disk if you plan to update or obsolete hard disk.
Is Hard Drive Destruction Service Necessary?
At present, domestic and foreign experts and manufacturers have proposed many destruction methods, among which the mainstream hard disk destruction methods are erasing, degaussing and shredding technologies.
1. Erasing method: If you want to keep the drive usable but data erased, you can use this method. However, this method is not applicable to hard disks containing highly confidential information, nor is it applicable to faulty hard disks, as this method may not completely erase the data.
2. Degaussing method: This method applies an instantaneous strong magnetic field to the hard disk to change the polarity direction of the magnetic particles on the surface of the medium, making the magnetic particles unable to express the data. You can use this method if you never use this disk again.
3. Shredding method: Physical crushing is the final form of hard drive destruction, mainly including crushing and high temperature melting. When shredding a disk, you should make sure that the shattering particles are small enough that the information cannot be reconstructed.
However, physical damage requires specific environment and equipment. In addition, it will produce toxic gases and substances, polluting the environment, so it can only be carried out by trained and authorized personnel.
Let’s make a conclusion. If you just want to wipe hard drive data, you can do that yourself through a data-wiping program. If you want to destroy your hard drive physically and permanently without worries about pollution, you should send your disk to a company especially providing hard drive destruction service to get it destroyed.
How to Destroy Hard Drive by Yourself?
You can also destroy your hard drive by yourself if you want to save money. After all, hard drive destruction costs from $4 to $12 per drive. Here is the tutorial on how to destroy hard drive:
Step 1: Remove your hard drive from the computer.
Step 2: Wear your eye protection on.
Step 3: Repeatedly strike the hard drive on various sides until it starts to open. Then, maneuver out the round silver platter disk from inside. Ding, dent and scratch this platter.
Step 4: Box up the components and turn them in at your local electronics recycling center.
If you want to know more about how to destroy hard drive data, please refer to the following post.
About The Author
Position: Columnist
Linda has been working as an editor at MiniTool for 5 years. She is always curious about computer knowledge and learns it crazily. Her articles are simple and easy to understand. Even people who do not understand computer can gain something. By the way, her special focuses are disk management, data recovery and PDF editing.