Over the years, there has been much misinformation floating around about destroying data or wiping data on hard drives. If you do not want to accidentally hand over your company’s data or your employees’ and customers’ personal and confidential information to a competitor or a criminal, there are some important things you will need to know about making the confidential information on your hard drives permanently irrecoverable.
It is important to remember that reformatting the hard drive on your desktop or laptop computer does not mean that you have erased all the data on those devices. So, what does reformatting the hard drive do? Reformatting a hard drive removes anyone’s ability to see and access the data because it clears the File Allocation Table.
You cannot successfully erase data once stored on a hard drive if you want to continue using that drive. In this case, the only thing you will be able to do is overwrite the data. You can erase data on Hard Disk Drives by destroying the magnetic fields on the disk. This process of erasing data by destroying the magnetic fields on the disk is known as degaussing. However, it is important to know that the degaussing process will result in the drive not having the ability to store any data.
On the other hand, you cannot degauss SSD because there are no magnetic fields on these drives. While you cannot degauss these drives, you can overwritten, or physically destroy them. If you have prioritized permanently destroying your data and hardware, you will need to use proper data destruction technology.
About Phiston
At Phiston Technologies, our hard drive destruction technology will ensure compliance with the industry’s regulations and best practices for data destruction and data security. Contact us today to find out how we can help you keep your data secure.
