the data that we keep on our storage devices can be very valuable And there may be times when we want to be absolutely sure that nobody else can gain access to this data especially on storage drives that we're no longer using And one of the most effective ways to provide this type of assurance is physically destroying the storage device And there are many different ways to provide this type of storage destruction One of these ways is to use a drill or a hammer or anything that would destroy the media itself It's relatively easy to drill a hole through the platters of a hard drive and that would effectively prevent us from recovering any data from this hard drive If you have a lot of drives that you need to destroy you might want to use some industrial equipment such as a shredder You throw the drives into the shredder and it will grind them up into smaller metal pieces For spinning hard drives you could also use a very powerful magnet known as a degasser This will remove the magnetic field associated with this drive It removes all of the data from the drive and it renders the hard drive itself unusable going forward Unfortunately deaussing does not work for SSD drives or flash memory drives And one way of ensuring that this drive will never be used again is to throw it in an incinerator But there may be times when you would like to repurpose this drive It's a perfectly working hard drive or a perfectly working SSD So we should be able to delete all of the data on that drive in a way that we can feel is secure and would prevent anybody gaining access to any of that previous data One of the ways to do that would be to use a file level overriding For example on the Microsoft Windows CIS internal site you can download a utility called SDEE This will securely delete files and prevent anyone from recovering that data later And of course you can perform a similar function across the entire drive using specialized utilities such as DBAN that stands for Derek's boot and Nuke This will delete all of the data across the entire drive and allow you to use that drive again These utilities work very well for a hard drive but unfortunately an SSD can often store information outside the scope of a file system rendering these types of file level deletion utilities relatively worthless Another way to delete everything on a drive is to format it When you receive a hard drive from the factory it has been preformatted with something called a low-level format This is usually a feature or a function that's not available to the end user and is usually only done in the factory When we receive the drive we're able to put a file system on that drive and we can format that drive with the file system There are a number of different formatting options available One is a standard format You might also see this referred to as a quick format This will build the index for the file system It will install a boot sector on the drive but it's only clearing out the index to the data and it's not actually deleting the data that's in the other part of the drive If you do have the right software you will still be able to recover all of the data after a quick format The default format type in Windows is called a standard format or regular format This will not only clear out your index but it will go through every sector on the drive and overwrite all of the data that was previously there This does take a bit of time to go through every single sector that's on the drive but once it's done you have a completely clean drive and no way to recover that previous data Obviously physical destruction of the drive is one way that you can be assured that none of that data will be available again But it may seem a bit of a waste to take a perfectly working drive and destroy it But if you work for a financial services company or you work in healthcare you might want to be assured that no one would ever gain access to any of that sensitive data So although the end of this destruction process makes a device that can't be used anymore we can be absolutely sure that that data will always remain safe And in some cases you might be legally required to destroy that drive to ensure that all of that information is secure and that nobody else can get their hands on that sensitive data If you have one or two drives a month that need to be destroyed you might be able to do that yourself with a hammer or with a drill But if you're a large organization that has thousands of drives that you need to destroy every month you might want to hire a third party to provide that service Of course you still need to be assured that all of that data will be properly destroyed and you need some way to hand this drive off to the third party but still get reassurances that all of that information is no longer available These thirdparty providers will commonly provide a certificate of destruction This is a document that shows that they received a particular drive they destroyed the drive and they have evidence to show that all of that data is no longer available If you're using a third party to provide this type of destruction service you might want to also require that they provide a certificate of destruction This might be a bigger problem than you may realize In 2019 there was a study from Blanco and OnTrack that took 159 storage drives that they purchased on eBay and evaluated what type of data was on those drives 42% of those used drives had some type of sensitive data on the drive itself 66 of those drives had some type of data 25 of those drives had personally identifiable information And it was many different types of data that they found on these drives Information from a travel company freight company information student papers from a university and video audio and other personal media files This is another reason why it's so important to consider all of your options when it comes to decommissioning your storage drives