Fairfax Hard Drive Destruction

Did you know your hard drives in Fairfax also need to be destroyed before they leave your possession in order to be compliant with local and federal privacy laws? That’s because digital files are fully recoverable from an old hard drive, even if you’ve scrubbed that hard drive of your files.

In fact, in 2010 Affinity Health Plan discovered the consequences of failing to destroy hard drives in copiers and scanners they were leasing when thousands of their clients’ records were discovered on these drives. Simply wiping a hard drive clean of your files is not enough to ensure they cannot be recoverable.

There is no other option when it comes to ensuring your security than physically destroying old hard drives. Fairfax Paper Shredding offers hard drive shredding options across Fairfax. Our contractors pulverize your hard drives to ensure their destruction. Your hard drive can be destroyed on-site or at a secure plant, after which, the pieces are melted down and the bits are recycled. There will be no question about your security after their destruction.

Don’t forget about hard drives hidden around your home or office that are also at risk! Don’t make the same mistake Affinity Health Plan did in 2010. Hard drives are hidden all around your home and office in many of the electronic devices that you use, simply because many of these devices need a hard drive in order to operate. That means that any file you’ve ever sent to any of these devices might have potentially saved a copy of it on its hard drive over the course of its lifetime. Here a list of some electronic devices you might have forgotten about:

1. RAM and ROM-based storage devices
2. Optical media—CDs and DVDs
3. USB removable media—pen drives, thumb drives, flash drives, and sticks
4. PC hard drives
5. Fax machines, scanners, copiers, and printers
6. Biomedical devices—physiologic monitors, infusion pumps, ventilators, MRI, CT, and diagnostic ultrasound and laboratory analyzers
7. Embedded flash on boards and devices—motherboards and peripheral cards such as network adapters or any other adapter containing non-volatile flash memory
8. Mobile devices—cell phones, smart phones, PDAs, tablets and laptops
9. Legacy magnetic media—floppy drives, zip disks, and magnetic tapes
10. Memory cards—SD, SDHC, MMC, compact flash, microdrive, and memory sticks

Electronic data can still be recovered even after it is destroyed, and this is due to improper destruction. Hard drive data shredding ensure complete destruction of all information once stored on the drive.

The process is rather simple:

1. Drop off the hard drives or have them picked up
2. The drives are destroyed in an industrial shredder
3. A certificate of Destruction is sent

A certificate of destruction ensures you that your hard drives were, in fact, destroyed completely. So, you can rest easy knowing you are secure.