A big part of this site’s pitch to its clients, including the “hyperscale” customers with gigantic data centers nearby, is that each device is labeled, tracked, and inventoried for its drives—both obvious and hidden—and is either securely wiped or destroyed. The process, commonly called ITAD, is used by larger businesses, especially when they upgrade fleets of servers or workers’ devices. ITAD providers ensure all the old gear is wiped clean, then resold, repurposed, recycled, or destroyed.

We have to do this ourselves in the government for every decommissioned server/appliance/end user device. We have to fill out paperwork for every single storage drive we destroy, and we can only destroy them using approved destruction tools (e.g. specific degaussers, drive shredders/crushers, etc). Appliances can be kind of a pain, though. It can be tricky sometimes finding all the writable memory in things like switches and routers. But, nothing is worse than storage arrays… destroying hundreds of drives is incredibly tedious.