"Dropped" Shipment Requires Secure Disk Eradication

A major U.S. based instrumentation company encountered an unusual situation upon delivery of a new disk subsystem.

When the delivery company "dropped" the equipment off at their dock they literally dropped the equipment, rendering the subsystem inoperable.

As a result, the company was faced with an unusual requirement – performing a fully certified eradication process on a disk subsystem they had not yet started to use. Why? Their iron-clad data security policies require full scale eradication of any data prior to storage systems leaving their premises. No exceptions.

Before allowing the subsystem to head off to the salvage company the company called in PeakData Services to eradicate the data from 100 72 GB drives. The PeakData process involved eradicating data stored on drives at the bit-level using a three (3)-pass overwrite process that complies with the minimum specifications set forth in the United States Department of Defense (U.S. DoD) Standard 5220.22-M (Clearing). If disk drives fail the overwrite process they are physically destroyed using a destruction and recycling process that complies with the minimum specifications set forth in U.S. DoD Standard 5220.22-M (Sanitization).