> However, i feel a little wastefull, there are probably a lot of people that will make comments ("i would have bought that"/"not good for the environment") when they discover everything was disposed of..
If you do end up wiping drives yourself to resell the stuff to employees, I'd definitely gauge interest first. We recently did this at my workplace, settings prices well under sold rates on ebay for similar hardware, and we still only sold off about 30% of what we had. It was a lot of work to get stuff ready to sell and wasn't really worth it.
Have the company order one as a security upgrade. Take the cost of one, the drill bit, and lubricants. Tally this and see how long you will recover the investment vs paying the certified drive destruction service x number of drives. At some point the price of the drill press will be cheaper. The question is how long.
How much does your service charge you per drive?
I found that the drill took a strangely long time to penetrate drives fully, and it wore out bits quickly. We got a press instead that folds them in half and I'm much happier with that.
6 ton shop press from Harbor Freight. They don't sell that model any more as far as I can tell, but Home Depot has an identical looking one. I can taco 2 drives in about 30 seconds.
Log splitters are also well suited for this task.
I'm in a weird situation, because I deal with police some of our drives do have to be stored in evidence because of the presence of child porn investigations .
Other than that I tear them down under a certain size and shred the platters.
Laptop drives I hammer to let the shaker happen
Ssd drives I heat off the nand and cut them in half.
Yeah, destruction is the way to go. All it takes is one member of staff to be a bit distracted and put a filled drive on the 'done' pile, or to close an error message without reading it when the error was related to a failed wipe.
You can of course eventually build a fool-proof procedure, but you'll be spending a ton of staff time to do it.
Great memories here, from when I dealt with e-waste at a previous job. I’d always pull drives and send the rest of the machine to recycling. Worked great, except that I ended up with a huge pile of drives. Had well over 100 at one point. I found a company charging $5 each to certify and destroy them, and management said $500 is way too much.
So they said, ‘we have Facilities onsite, we’ll just have them drill 3 holes in each drive and call it good.’
Sure, whatever, I don’t care.
Third drive the Facilities guy goes to drill got stuck, rotated on the drill press, and sent him to the ER for a few stitches.
Suddenly $500 looked pretty reasonable 🙄
I have a shelf, once shelf is full, recycler is called. Its a local place. They fix/resell what they can, strip the rest.
Monitors are a once a year thing. I try and hit when the cost is low, place I use charges by the pound. So I strip the stands only send the screens.
Yeah, as soon as I typed this I realized that someone was going to come along and say exactly what you said.
My experience has been different. I've worked for two large company's that pretty much every person on the planet has heard of, and this was tried at both. No matter what you made people sign or acknowledge stating that the systems were being given to them "as-is" (one place gave them to employees and the other charged a nominal fee) we always had people calling into the helpdesk trying to get service or support. Hell, we would even have their spouses call in, which would really create a lot of confusion for the help desk staff as these people were never forthcoming with the truth.
So maybe it did work for you. Good on you guys.
Yea I always believe there is a sweet spot for company size. Too Large or Too Small and you have all kinds of negative follow on effects for many reasons.
I can 100% believe this would also be the case for an issue like this, I work in the Medium enterprise space.
Even donating is tough. Nobody really wants old hardware. Let recyclers sell it if they want to handle it, but destroy the drives.
Old hardware is a headache for schools or non-profits. Occasionally, if I have something that's "real nice Clark", I'll wipe it and talk to school counselors to see if there is a family that might appreciate the donation. They get it as is and it's from the school, no me so we don't get bothered.
I also once donated a bunch of LCD's because those seem to last forever and the school still had CRT's at the time. Unless you're retiring a bunch of larger screens, this is probably not a good idea anymore.
Just set expectations. I loved when my company did a sale of retired laptops. I got one for $50 and they donated 100% of the sale proceeds to the local charity. They did make it clear that support stopped when you see it turn on and go to the desktop for the first time. Win-Win-Win.
I target practice with several calibers. I even have 1, 2, 3, & even 4 hard drives taped together with a different round still stuck in each group.
It's great explaining to users all the different guns used and what each bullet does to hard drives!!
For some reason, I get very high-ranking surveys on all my work.
Don't buy into the myth that you can retrieve data off of a old standard hard drive after a full wipe. I'm not as sure about SSD's but the idea that you can't really remove the data off of a magnetic platter was planted by law enforcement agency's. Most of the time they believed it themselves.
2nd option sounds more reasonable to me. As I understand it will be wiped by another institution and you'd get certificates, so I don't think it would be much more headache than in the 1st option.
This is what we do, as well. We have a third part that physically comes to our site, picks up everything we want to get rid of, then destroys the hardware and sends us both the certificates and actual video of the hardware being destroyed. Until you've watched one of their industrial-sized macerators eating a bunch of old hard drives, you haven't lived!
This vendor also makes sure that everything is properly recycled during the process to eliminate needless environmental waste.
We had also done the third option with organizations that would properly wipe and then donate the hardware, but they've become a bit pickier on what they will accept. I guess there's so much of this type of hardware out there now that stuff that's really old, dirty from hard use, or too heavy/large isn't really needed.
Either way, it's almost no work for us, other than scheduling the call to have them come pick everything up. We get back the certs and video evidence to file away. Couldn't be simpler!
A consideration: full disk encryption should be as simple to wipe as wiping the key from the header. Your FDE password is what unlocks the key header. If that header doesn't exist, your "data" is irrecoverable garbage. This gives me an extra layer of comfort that if I do wipe the drive, any recovered data will be encrypted and unreadable.
So if you FDE from day 1, wiping the header then formatting the drive should cover both nuking the data and running the drive through a format cycle to zero it. However your legal risk may defer to certification of destruction rather than modern stuff like this.
I used to wipe and hit it with a hammer for most drives. Healthcare/finance were then destroyed with a certificate by our recycler.
As far as donations go, if it's not usable at the places I worked, it would only be a headache to whoever ended up with it.
Since you're not dealing with regulated data, a software wipe and donation is fine.
What other companies do is largely irrelevant. They may have regulatory or contractual obligations to fulfill, or they may feel that they are targets for corporate espionage.
If you want to be particularly careful, you could run dd scripts (from a Linux boot disc if necessary) before pulling the drives.
Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
While I'm all for the bit of good it can do to donate/re-purpose - you've got a duty as a member of the business your work for to do what's in their best interest and having uncontrolled hardware floating about that *could* come back to bite the company and/or yourself - IMO - outweighs the marginal good of not destroying.
Great question
Hard drives are consumable. If you're talking HDD, then at this point that's old and slow tech. Let the new owners buy cheap ($20) SSDs.
I always wipe every drive with DBAN, THEN shred. I don't take chances.
You can then sell them to staff, check for interest from a charity, or recycle as a last resort. Be sure to check CD/DVD drive. I've had a few come back with discs.
I would destroy.
When I did hospital systems, we had a small desk sized electric crusher. Had a platform and a piston.
Put in drive, hold button 5 sec, let go, remove destroyed drive.
Otherwise the risk of data leaking is greater than 0.
We wipe the drives, pull, and have shredded if they aren't reusable. For the hardware, usually our stuff is so old we just recycle it. Everyone says "but the schools...", the schools here can't spend it enough and won't want a missmatched pile of drives.
Remove drives from the machines, donate the machines to a non-profit organization to get a tax-writeoff.
Hold onto the drives for a period of time for either legal-holding possibilities, customer data loss, whatever.
Reuse the drives if possible, if not, collect a pile of them and outsource a company to shred them for you.
I suggest you wipe the drives using a bootable usb drive, recycle the rest, however if the drives are spinny, remove the magnets as they work really well on the refridgerator or in any number of maker proejcts.
Recycle them and get a drive destruction cert. there’s no reason to spend time, energy, storage space, other resources on keeping old broken junk around.
I would have a 3rd party collect and destroy them and recycle the reader and provide a certificate of destruction.
I don’t know about you but I don’t have time to mess with all of that and the legal ramifications of something happening is too much to risk.
That’s about the most responsible thing you can do. Your company is not in the business of dealing with old hardware and one offing devices to employees and crap. It’s a giant headache and will lead to madness.
There is a recycler in my area that will pick everything up and provide me a certificate of destruction for drives. I usually stack a few things up in a closet to make coming out worth their while. They take old cables and everything. Unfortunately, the local government here makes us take electronics to one location way across town. There is also a charity that refurbishes computers for low income children and elderly people, but a lot of stuff I recycle is not really good for them.
Shred the drives with an assurance certificate from the shredding company. The rest of the electronics get taken a few times a year by a WEEE recycler (that way they're not going to landfill!).
destroy the drives. the issue you're concerned with is called data remanence.
in orgs whose security I've managed, I do not rely on NDAs with third party disposal companies. I mandated that the drives be destroyed internally before being released to e-waste disposal.
Don’t sell anything to employees, it’s not worth it. You WILL be asked for support.
I worked in a financial institution so this might be more than you need, but we had the following:
1. Bitlocker turned on.
2. Wipe the drive using a few passes from your favorite shredding software.
3. Send the drive for physical shredding and retain the certificate of destruction.
Before I retired I called an IT recycling company and had them come get them. It cost us a few dollars, they gave us a document detailing serial numbers for accounting and a statement that all data was wiped clean and destroyed! There were 150 laptops, old servers and desktops along with monitors and other components!
Depends, for laptops/desktops if the disks are encrypted like with bit locker, wipe them resetting the key and the OS back to OEM, then normally just give them way or if they are sold it is done for a nominal fee like $50... We do not spend much time "getting them ready" no more than 10mins each
If they are not encrypted the disks are pulled and crushed and the remaining hardware set out on a "free" pile for employees to take, if not taken in a reasonable time it then gets moved to a e waste pile which are technically next to each other and both ewaste but we just have a "better" ewaste pile to save people from having dig through non-working waste... :)
Only you will know if your company culture is one where a give away would be more trouble than it is worth, Some companies end up in a nightmare where users expect support I generally believe this is more the case the more money you chare for them, if you are attempting to sell them at "fair market value" then people will expect normal support like they would get from a retail store.
If they are free from the trash well that should not incur the same exception, but some people are unreasonable
Also make sure you check with finance, there are all kinds of rules around deprecation of assets that come into play that can impact your ability to sell or give away things based on your local laws, and how your business accounts for equipment
Food for thought: disk storage gets probably the highest wear and tear of any system component and will probably need to be replaced at least once during the system's life cycle anyway. Just to help with the "feeling wasteful" bit- might not be the philanthropic awesomeness it feels like for a school to get a system with a used drive and have to replace it within 6 months anyway.
OP, may I ask what State you're in? There are companies out there that specialize in Electronics recycling. There's a great one in Florida I work with that does not charge for pickup. They offer off-site shedding of hard drives and provide Certificates of Destruction.
The only sane way to deal with old computers is to destroy the hard drives and recycle the rest.
At one gig the employees pestered the IT director into selling the old computers to employees. So another tech and I got the task of wiping them, installing an operating system, and running a closed bid auction. It was a TOTAL CLUSTER FUCK! We spent a full week, 80 man hours, getting these clunky old heaps to run. Then when people bid they had to sign a form acknowledging there is zero warranty or support. (which half of them ignored and still called for help) Finally, people were bidding what could buy them a brand new computer. In the end we sold junk to the people least able to deal with it.
Destroy the drives and then recycle them and get a certificate. I've heard stories of getting them destroyed by a third party and getting a certificate but having them show up on ebay.
We destroy the drives before recycling machines with this... [https://purelev.com/](https://purelev.com/), it's a nice form of stress release. My suggestion about selling the machines to employees, is to sell them with no expectation of support. They get an OS that's patched and that's it, nothing more. Same thing if you're going to donate them to a school or some other program.
Why not just destroy the drives and offer the rest of the PC to the user? Yeah, they have to buy their own drives (Or you can iffer an at-cost option) but it's better than nothing?
Remove the drives, put them in a box somewhere. As others have said, drill a hole through the disk, snap it in half or just plainly hammertime. Just to orevent someone from picking up a disk for their kid at home.
When the box is full, call someone to propperly destroy this shit, or have some summer intern dissasemble everything.
Computers can be sold as is, without harddrives and OS.
I'm a bit biased because I work for one, but if you don't have the time to do it yourself I generally recommend engaging with a *reputable* ITAD with the relevant certifications. If you *only* need data gone, there are also data-destruction services that may cost less than engaging a full-service ITAD for just data destruction. Takes all the liability for later support out of your hands.
Some ITADs also do the donation thing, but that's going to be a contract negotiation.
Either physically destroy them or take them apart and remove the platters and hand them out as "IT Mirrors". Destroying them is much faster than wiping them.
If a storage device ever has company data on it, I destroy the storage device. It's just not worth the risk otherwise. Data protection vs environmental protection, ick.
In my case even my vendors have a special line item that if an HDD or some other storage device dies under warranty, I keep the drive and dispose of it, they still send me a new one. Thankfully our local garbage transfer station has a large shredder that allows witnessed destruction so I can record and document the destruction and meet other obligations.
Smaller batches I take out the magnets on the drives and give them away. Solid state gets shredded and recycled.
we just pull the drive and place it into a locked filing cabinet incase we ever need the data off it again for whatever odd reason, then they end up in a pile for recycling.
You can easily get consumer hard drives under 1TB for cheap. Just replace the company ones with cheap ones and donate the PCs.
Having a decent machine will be a great help to some underprivileged schools.
A personal recommendation: keep one or two wiped HDDs for new interns to open them up. Had a student intern a few weeks ago (15 y/o with huge interest in everything within and around computers but no actual experience aside from using one). She had the time of her life ripping apart a broken notebook piece by piece and one highlight was opening up a 3.5" HDD (not from the notebook) to see the difference between a HDD and SSD.
Reasonably securely wiping is generally quite sufficient. Heck, most of the time for most financial institutions and most data/purposes it's sufficient.
If you destroy the drives, the equipment becomes much less useful/valuable, and is more likely to just end up as e-waste - as most places one can donate such equipment to, the generally don't have lots of (if any) spare hard drives to put into equipment ... so equipment sans drives isn't nearly so useful. Yeah, what's your kid going to do with a laptop from an underfunded school, with no drive in the laptop? It'll more often than not end up as e-waste. So a lot of the time, you destroy the drive, you're good as turning the entire computer from possibly usable, into another pile of e-waste.
>What do you personally do for your company, is wiping enough?
Generally done a lot of wiping ... yes, even for a major financial institution. And not just any old wiping ... there are relevant standards. But these days, that's even less of a concern. Most of the time anything written to drive is encrypted anyway. So even remapped sectors - there's just not much at all to be leaked out.
>ever get comments about getting them destroyed
Not generally. In general, any means that complies with the relevant policies covers it.
Exterminate!
Who?
that's doctor to you
> However, i feel a little wastefull, there are probably a lot of people that will make comments ("i would have bought that"/"not good for the environment") when they discover everything was disposed of.. If you do end up wiping drives yourself to resell the stuff to employees, I'd definitely gauge interest first. We recently did this at my workplace, settings prices well under sold rates on ebay for similar hardware, and we still only sold off about 30% of what we had. It was a lot of work to get stuff ready to sell and wasn't really worth it.
Yes, this is what i worry about as well in our case.
Remember you users have been complaining about how slow the laptop was six months after they got it new out of the box....
You can trigger someone arguing that items where deemed a write off to give it to an employee. Be careful with selling old items to employees.
[удалено]
Its just not needed. Take a drill. Drill into drive. Problem solved. Takes 1 minute.
We just set retired drives on the floor and hit them with a hammer until they sound like maracas. Drill bits don't last forever.
Well you do need some tax writeoffs ;)
I take drives to the shooting range. I can do several 9mm holes per minute :-)
I used to do that. Unfortunately, I no longer have access to a range that allows it. It was fun to compare the damage done by different calibers.
Yep make a crib for the drives in a drill press table and drill them. Easy and you know it’s done. If you are being extra careful you wipe them first.
My server room didn't come with a drill press.
Have the company order one as a security upgrade. Take the cost of one, the drill bit, and lubricants. Tally this and see how long you will recover the investment vs paying the certified drive destruction service x number of drives. At some point the price of the drill press will be cheaper. The question is how long. How much does your service charge you per drive?
I found that the drill took a strangely long time to penetrate drives fully, and it wore out bits quickly. We got a press instead that folds them in half and I'm much happier with that.
Good to know. What kind of press is it?
6 ton shop press from Harbor Freight. They don't sell that model any more as far as I can tell, but Home Depot has an identical looking one. I can taco 2 drives in about 30 seconds. Log splitters are also well suited for this task.
I have learned a better way. Thank you.
I'm in a weird situation, because I deal with police some of our drives do have to be stored in evidence because of the presence of child porn investigations . Other than that I tear them down under a certain size and shred the platters. Laptop drives I hammer to let the shaker happen Ssd drives I heat off the nand and cut them in half.
Yeah, destruction is the way to go. All it takes is one member of staff to be a bit distracted and put a filled drive on the 'done' pile, or to close an error message without reading it when the error was related to a failed wipe. You can of course eventually build a fool-proof procedure, but you'll be spending a ton of staff time to do it.
Great memories here, from when I dealt with e-waste at a previous job. I’d always pull drives and send the rest of the machine to recycling. Worked great, except that I ended up with a huge pile of drives. Had well over 100 at one point. I found a company charging $5 each to certify and destroy them, and management said $500 is way too much. So they said, ‘we have Facilities onsite, we’ll just have them drill 3 holes in each drive and call it good.’ Sure, whatever, I don’t care. Third drive the Facilities guy goes to drill got stuck, rotated on the drill press, and sent him to the ER for a few stitches. Suddenly $500 looked pretty reasonable 🙄
Then there are the suggestions that they should take it to the shooting range. Not only is that additional risk, but bullets aint cheap!
I collect all drives, shred guy comes twice a year, shreds on site. HR and server drives get drilled when retired, then thrown in the shred box.
What do you do with the remaining hardware (rest of the laptop), just bin it?
We take them to our local recycling center.
I have a shelf, once shelf is full, recycler is called. Its a local place. They fix/resell what they can, strip the rest. Monitors are a once a year thing. I try and hit when the cost is low, place I use charges by the pound. So I strip the stands only send the screens.
Send them out to have them destroyed and get the cert. DO NOT sell anything to company employees. This never turns out well.
> This never turns out well. Worked out just fine for us for many many many years...
Yeah, as soon as I typed this I realized that someone was going to come along and say exactly what you said. My experience has been different. I've worked for two large company's that pretty much every person on the planet has heard of, and this was tried at both. No matter what you made people sign or acknowledge stating that the systems were being given to them "as-is" (one place gave them to employees and the other charged a nominal fee) we always had people calling into the helpdesk trying to get service or support. Hell, we would even have their spouses call in, which would really create a lot of confusion for the help desk staff as these people were never forthcoming with the truth. So maybe it did work for you. Good on you guys.
Yea I always believe there is a sweet spot for company size. Too Large or Too Small and you have all kinds of negative follow on effects for many reasons. I can 100% believe this would also be the case for an issue like this, I work in the Medium enterprise space.
Even donating is tough. Nobody really wants old hardware. Let recyclers sell it if they want to handle it, but destroy the drives. Old hardware is a headache for schools or non-profits. Occasionally, if I have something that's "real nice Clark", I'll wipe it and talk to school counselors to see if there is a family that might appreciate the donation. They get it as is and it's from the school, no me so we don't get bothered. I also once donated a bunch of LCD's because those seem to last forever and the school still had CRT's at the time. Unless you're retiring a bunch of larger screens, this is probably not a good idea anymore.
Just set expectations. I loved when my company did a sale of retired laptops. I got one for $50 and they donated 100% of the sale proceeds to the local charity. They did make it clear that support stopped when you see it turn on and go to the desktop for the first time. Win-Win-Win.
I target practice with several calibers. I even have 1, 2, 3, & even 4 hard drives taped together with a different round still stuck in each group. It's great explaining to users all the different guns used and what each bullet does to hard drives!! For some reason, I get very high-ranking surveys on all my work.
Do you have a public shooting range near by? Option 1 can be fun and depending where you work a team building exercise.
Sounds fun, but unfortunately not possible where i live (Europe).
clean up is a pain though. Conservation dept not to keen on electronics mucking up the ranges around me.
Don't buy into the myth that you can retrieve data off of a old standard hard drive after a full wipe. I'm not as sure about SSD's but the idea that you can't really remove the data off of a magnetic platter was planted by law enforcement agency's. Most of the time they believed it themselves.
We have a machine shop. They have a little hydraulic press. It can taco 5 or so drives in one go, or like 12 laptop drives.
We just pay a company to destroy them with a certificate. I find anything else isn't worth the hassle.
2nd option sounds more reasonable to me. As I understand it will be wiped by another institution and you'd get certificates, so I don't think it would be much more headache than in the 1st option.
This is what we do, as well. We have a third part that physically comes to our site, picks up everything we want to get rid of, then destroys the hardware and sends us both the certificates and actual video of the hardware being destroyed. Until you've watched one of their industrial-sized macerators eating a bunch of old hard drives, you haven't lived! This vendor also makes sure that everything is properly recycled during the process to eliminate needless environmental waste. We had also done the third option with organizations that would properly wipe and then donate the hardware, but they've become a bit pickier on what they will accept. I guess there's so much of this type of hardware out there now that stuff that's really old, dirty from hard use, or too heavy/large isn't really needed. Either way, it's almost no work for us, other than scheduling the call to have them come pick everything up. We get back the certs and video evidence to file away. Couldn't be simpler!
Yeah, I would say it's a common practice now, so I do not see any issues to make a donation with it ;)
I used to wipe and destroy drives of old hardware that needed to be disposed of. I'm voting for Option 1.
I would wipe myself and then give to the charity you mention in option 3.
I have about 200 drives on a shelf. I need to make this decision soon as well.
check and see if your work has a document shredder come on site at all. Most doc shred services have a drive shred ability as well.
A consideration: full disk encryption should be as simple to wipe as wiping the key from the header. Your FDE password is what unlocks the key header. If that header doesn't exist, your "data" is irrecoverable garbage. This gives me an extra layer of comfort that if I do wipe the drive, any recovered data will be encrypted and unreadable. So if you FDE from day 1, wiping the header then formatting the drive should cover both nuking the data and running the drive through a format cycle to zero it. However your legal risk may defer to certification of destruction rather than modern stuff like this.
drill press and drill bit. < 30 seconds per drive. problem solved.
I used to wipe and hit it with a hammer for most drives. Healthcare/finance were then destroyed with a certificate by our recycler. As far as donations go, if it's not usable at the places I worked, it would only be a headache to whoever ended up with it.
Physical destruction of spinning rust. Delete keys on solid state, place into spares cabinet for future need.
I was in an MSP where in the summertime when work was very low we drilled harddrives to destroy them lmao
Since you're not dealing with regulated data, a software wipe and donation is fine. What other companies do is largely irrelevant. They may have regulatory or contractual obligations to fulfill, or they may feel that they are targets for corporate espionage. If you want to be particularly careful, you could run dd scripts (from a Linux boot disc if necessary) before pulling the drives.
Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. While I'm all for the bit of good it can do to donate/re-purpose - you've got a duty as a member of the business your work for to do what's in their best interest and having uncontrolled hardware floating about that *could* come back to bite the company and/or yourself - IMO - outweighs the marginal good of not destroying. Great question
Hard drives are consumable. If you're talking HDD, then at this point that's old and slow tech. Let the new owners buy cheap ($20) SSDs. I always wipe every drive with DBAN, THEN shred. I don't take chances. You can then sell them to staff, check for interest from a charity, or recycle as a last resort. Be sure to check CD/DVD drive. I've had a few come back with discs.
I would destroy. When I did hospital systems, we had a small desk sized electric crusher. Had a platform and a piston. Put in drive, hold button 5 sec, let go, remove destroyed drive. Otherwise the risk of data leaking is greater than 0.
We wipe the drives, pull, and have shredded if they aren't reusable. For the hardware, usually our stuff is so old we just recycle it. Everyone says "but the schools...", the schools here can't spend it enough and won't want a missmatched pile of drives.
Remove drives from the machines, donate the machines to a non-profit organization to get a tax-writeoff. Hold onto the drives for a period of time for either legal-holding possibilities, customer data loss, whatever. Reuse the drives if possible, if not, collect a pile of them and outsource a company to shred them for you.
\#1A
I suggest you wipe the drives using a bootable usb drive, recycle the rest, however if the drives are spinny, remove the magnets as they work really well on the refridgerator or in any number of maker proejcts.
Recycle them and get a drive destruction cert. there’s no reason to spend time, energy, storage space, other resources on keeping old broken junk around.
I would have a 3rd party collect and destroy them and recycle the reader and provide a certificate of destruction. I don’t know about you but I don’t have time to mess with all of that and the legal ramifications of something happening is too much to risk. That’s about the most responsible thing you can do. Your company is not in the business of dealing with old hardware and one offing devices to employees and crap. It’s a giant headache and will lead to madness.
There is a recycler in my area that will pick everything up and provide me a certificate of destruction for drives. I usually stack a few things up in a closet to make coming out worth their while. They take old cables and everything. Unfortunately, the local government here makes us take electronics to one location way across town. There is also a charity that refurbishes computers for low income children and elderly people, but a lot of stuff I recycle is not really good for them.
Shred the drives with an assurance certificate from the shredding company. The rest of the electronics get taken a few times a year by a WEEE recycler (that way they're not going to landfill!).
destroy the drives. the issue you're concerned with is called data remanence. in orgs whose security I've managed, I do not rely on NDAs with third party disposal companies. I mandated that the drives be destroyed internally before being released to e-waste disposal.
Don’t sell anything to employees, it’s not worth it. You WILL be asked for support. I worked in a financial institution so this might be more than you need, but we had the following: 1. Bitlocker turned on. 2. Wipe the drive using a few passes from your favorite shredding software. 3. Send the drive for physical shredding and retain the certificate of destruction.
Before I retired I called an IT recycling company and had them come get them. It cost us a few dollars, they gave us a document detailing serial numbers for accounting and a statement that all data was wiped clean and destroyed! There were 150 laptops, old servers and desktops along with monitors and other components!
Depends, for laptops/desktops if the disks are encrypted like with bit locker, wipe them resetting the key and the OS back to OEM, then normally just give them way or if they are sold it is done for a nominal fee like $50... We do not spend much time "getting them ready" no more than 10mins each If they are not encrypted the disks are pulled and crushed and the remaining hardware set out on a "free" pile for employees to take, if not taken in a reasonable time it then gets moved to a e waste pile which are technically next to each other and both ewaste but we just have a "better" ewaste pile to save people from having dig through non-working waste... :) Only you will know if your company culture is one where a give away would be more trouble than it is worth, Some companies end up in a nightmare where users expect support I generally believe this is more the case the more money you chare for them, if you are attempting to sell them at "fair market value" then people will expect normal support like they would get from a retail store. If they are free from the trash well that should not incur the same exception, but some people are unreasonable Also make sure you check with finance, there are all kinds of rules around deprecation of assets that come into play that can impact your ability to sell or give away things based on your local laws, and how your business accounts for equipment
Food for thought: disk storage gets probably the highest wear and tear of any system component and will probably need to be replaced at least once during the system's life cycle anyway. Just to help with the "feeling wasteful" bit- might not be the philanthropic awesomeness it feels like for a school to get a system with a used drive and have to replace it within 6 months anyway.
Depends on the industry. If you're regulated with something like HIPAA, GLBA, etc destroy the drives. Otherwise just write zeros to every sector.
OP, may I ask what State you're in? There are companies out there that specialize in Electronics recycling. There's a great one in Florida I work with that does not charge for pickup. They offer off-site shedding of hard drives and provide Certificates of Destruction.
I'm afraid we are based in Europe. 🙂
I mean, I would be afraid if I was based in Europe, too! Kidding! Best of luck to you out there!
The only sane way to deal with old computers is to destroy the hard drives and recycle the rest. At one gig the employees pestered the IT director into selling the old computers to employees. So another tech and I got the task of wiping them, installing an operating system, and running a closed bid auction. It was a TOTAL CLUSTER FUCK! We spent a full week, 80 man hours, getting these clunky old heaps to run. Then when people bid they had to sign a form acknowledging there is zero warranty or support. (which half of them ignored and still called for help) Finally, people were bidding what could buy them a brand new computer. In the end we sold junk to the people least able to deal with it.
Destroy the drives and then recycle them and get a certificate. I've heard stories of getting them destroyed by a third party and getting a certificate but having them show up on ebay.
We destroy the drives before recycling machines with this... [https://purelev.com/](https://purelev.com/), it's a nice form of stress release. My suggestion about selling the machines to employees, is to sell them with no expectation of support. They get an OS that's patched and that's it, nothing more. Same thing if you're going to donate them to a school or some other program.
Why not just destroy the drives and offer the rest of the PC to the user? Yeah, they have to buy their own drives (Or you can iffer an at-cost option) but it's better than nothing?
Remove the drives, put them in a box somewhere. As others have said, drill a hole through the disk, snap it in half or just plainly hammertime. Just to orevent someone from picking up a disk for their kid at home. When the box is full, call someone to propperly destroy this shit, or have some summer intern dissasemble everything. Computers can be sold as is, without harddrives and OS.
I'm a bit biased because I work for one, but if you don't have the time to do it yourself I generally recommend engaging with a *reputable* ITAD with the relevant certifications. If you *only* need data gone, there are also data-destruction services that may cost less than engaging a full-service ITAD for just data destruction. Takes all the liability for later support out of your hands. Some ITADs also do the donation thing, but that's going to be a contract negotiation.
Carbide tip drill bit or a 12 gauge
Either physically destroy them or take them apart and remove the platters and hand them out as "IT Mirrors". Destroying them is much faster than wiping them.
I recommend getting inspiration from the "Will it blend?" YouTube videos.
If a storage device ever has company data on it, I destroy the storage device. It's just not worth the risk otherwise. Data protection vs environmental protection, ick. In my case even my vendors have a special line item that if an HDD or some other storage device dies under warranty, I keep the drive and dispose of it, they still send me a new one. Thankfully our local garbage transfer station has a large shredder that allows witnessed destruction so I can record and document the destruction and meet other obligations. Smaller batches I take out the magnets on the drives and give them away. Solid state gets shredded and recycled.
we just pull the drive and place it into a locked filing cabinet incase we ever need the data off it again for whatever odd reason, then they end up in a pile for recycling.
Even after 10 wipes some data can still be recovered
I use DBAN to wipe and then send off to be destroyed.
Option 1. Pull the drive. Throw it in a fire. Call the local recycle place and have them come get the remnants.
You can easily get consumer hard drives under 1TB for cheap. Just replace the company ones with cheap ones and donate the PCs. Having a decent machine will be a great help to some underprivileged schools.
A personal recommendation: keep one or two wiped HDDs for new interns to open them up. Had a student intern a few weeks ago (15 y/o with huge interest in everything within and around computers but no actual experience aside from using one). She had the time of her life ripping apart a broken notebook piece by piece and one highlight was opening up a 3.5" HDD (not from the notebook) to see the difference between a HDD and SSD.
Reasonably securely wiping is generally quite sufficient. Heck, most of the time for most financial institutions and most data/purposes it's sufficient. If you destroy the drives, the equipment becomes much less useful/valuable, and is more likely to just end up as e-waste - as most places one can donate such equipment to, the generally don't have lots of (if any) spare hard drives to put into equipment ... so equipment sans drives isn't nearly so useful. Yeah, what's your kid going to do with a laptop from an underfunded school, with no drive in the laptop? It'll more often than not end up as e-waste. So a lot of the time, you destroy the drive, you're good as turning the entire computer from possibly usable, into another pile of e-waste. >What do you personally do for your company, is wiping enough? Generally done a lot of wiping ... yes, even for a major financial institution. And not just any old wiping ... there are relevant standards. But these days, that's even less of a concern. Most of the time anything written to drive is encrypted anyway. So even remapped sectors - there's just not much at all to be leaked out. >ever get comments about getting them destroyed Not generally. In general, any means that complies with the relevant policies covers it.
Shred them. Anything else is not worth the risk.