How to Securely Erase a Computer Hard Drive
20 years ago, the thought of having to be careful about your own data or figuring out how to erase a computer was completely alien! Nowadays, with everyone having a smart phones and computers signed into multiple devices, across multiple accounts, it’s imperative that you keep your business and personal data safe! That’s why we always recommend using our data destruction service to securely erase all your old home or business workstations and laptops. The last thing you want to do is throw out your old business computers to the local dump, and have them end up in the hands of criminals who can use your data to disrupt your business.
Why Erase your Old Hard Drives?
It is important to securely erase old hard drives to protect confidential data from being accessed by unauthorized people. Erasing the data prevents any information stored on the hard drive from being retrieved, thus protecting personal and sensitive information from being stolen or misused. Additionally, securely erasing a hard drive can help to protect the computer from viruses and malware, by ensuring that any malicious programs that may have been installed on the hard drive are completely erased and no longer present on the system.
What can we Digitally Erase?
At Purdie Worldwide, we’ve been securely erasing disks and devices since the turn of the century! Due to the amount of office moves and relocations we perform as apart of the BAR Commercial Moving Group, we’ve felt it necessary to have the software and skills to remove and wipe any old computers and drives. In fact, as in stands we’re the only BAR registered removal company that performs all of it’s disk erasing in-house!
So what can we digitally erase? At our main headquarters in Blackburn, we have a suite of computers to deal with the erasing of SATA hard drives, SAS drives, Magnetic Tape drives, 3.5″ Floppy Disks, USB thumb drives, external hard drives and even older IDE hard drives. The only media we are not capable of digitally wiping is 5 1/4″ discs. We can even securely wipe old android handsets before you trade them in. Unfortunately we do not offer this service on iphones, but will happily destroy them free of charge.
How do we Digitally Erase a Disc?
When you fill out one of our digital data destruction request forms, we contact you usually within 24 hours to go over your request. You can drop off your digital device at our depot in Blackburn, or we can arrange to have them uplifted from your office, home or workshop.
Once here, our specialist data destruction team get to work and install your drive into one of our dedicated data destruction workstations. These are not connected to our network in case of a trojan attack from a potentially infected disc, ensuring any viruses are contained and wiped securely.
Using specialist hardware and software, all hard drives are wiped of their directory structure, and then wiped by writing 1’s and 0’s into every sector. Every Hard Drive is wiped using the British HMG IS5 Baseline method along with a single verification pass. The ideal method for secure data destruction.
For every drive we wipe we issue a unique destruction certificate that details all the relevant hardware identifiers and the date and time the drive was destroyed. In fact all destruction and shredding services are certified to ISO 27001: 2005 (The International Information Security Standard), ISO 9001 (The Quality Standard) and ISO 14001 (The Environmental Standard).
As part of our Reduce, Reuse and Recycle policy, we recycle all hard drives and any computer components we receive. Many parts are combined to form working systems which are donated to youth projects and organisations within our local community.
So what are you waiting for? Securely erase your data and wipe your computer today with Purdie Worldwide using the form below:
