How To Recycle Hard Drives With The Destroyinator

Data Recycling: What does that mean?

For this blog and the topic moving forward, when we say data recycling, we are referring to the process of wiping hard drives clean of any pre-existing data that is contained on them.

How do you do this safely and effectively? With a Destroyinator.

So, what, exactly, is a Destroyinator?

Well, if you’re not already familiar with the name, a Destroyinator is a 45Drives product. Like many of our flagship models, it comes in 30, 45, and 60 bay configurations. What makes it different from our other products, though, is that the Destroyinator is designed to erase multiple hard drives simultaneously—its purpose is to wipe them clean of all existing data.

Normally, you would hire disk sanitation services from an external vendor or third party to do this. Going this route, you have to pay per wipe. In other words, you have to pay a fixed price for every single hard drive that you wipe. If you have a lot of hard drives or erasing batches of them regularly, those costs can really start to add up!

For some, paying per drive wipe might not be economically feasible, requiring you to rely on guesswork and hope by sourcing the less expensive options that may not yield the same guarantees as those issued by reputable vendors. Or, you may need to resort to erasing the data on your own with inaccurate methods that don’t come with the same assurances—all because you can’t justify the hefty price tag associated with using a certified vendor. Then it’s really a game of hoping you made the right choice and crossing your fingers that all of the data you’re erasing is truly gone for good.

With one of our Destroyinator units, those wipe costs are drastically reduced. This is achieved in a few different ways.

The first, of course, is the sheer density of the units. Allowing you, as we mentioned earlier, to wipe many hard drives at a time. We’ll cover just what that means in further detail shortly.

Secondly, Destroyinators come standard with KillDisk software that is fully supported for one year. This piece of software destroys data permanently, and it meets many regulatory compliance measures (more on that below).

Another great thing about the Destroyinators, besides the number of drives you can have inside them, is the fact that you can destroy drives of different sizes. For example, you can wipe a batch of 2TB drives along with a batch of 18TB drives; together, in the same batch, quickly and easily.

Now, let’s actually go through those three main advantages of a 45Drives’ Destroyinator. We’ll walk through how each of them can significantly reduce both the costs and risks associated with trying to permanently erase data from a single hard drive or a collection of drives.

Destroyinator Advantages

Unit density

Briefly, we mentioned that the Destroyinator units come in 30, 40, and even 60 bay designs. If you’re not familiar with our products already, that’s okay!

Here at 45Drives, we’re known for designing really dense servers. So much so that our units, like you, probably guessed, can accommodate up to 60 drive slots occupied simultaneously.

Imagine being able to destroy the data on up to 60 drives at a time! How much of an impact can have on the cost per wipe and the time you can save in doing so! All while having full control over the disk sanitization process.

If you don’t need something within our usual parameters, our team of Account Managers can work with you to try and spec something smaller.

KillDisk Equipped

A 45Drives Destroyinator comes standard with KillDisk software that is fully supported for one year.

Direct from their website: KillDisk is a powerful and portable software that allows you to destroy all data on hard disks, solid-state disks (SSD), and memory Cards, excluding any possibility of deleted files and folders data recovery.

KillDisk supports U.S. DoD 5220.22-M  erasure; it is HIPAA and NIST compliant, and it adheres to more than 20 international data sanitizing standards. By using the Destroyinator and KillDisk together, you’re getting that peace of mind in knowing that the data you’re deleting is gone completely. 

Plus! with every disk wipe you do, you also receive a wipe certificate. This certificate provides another layer of validation and the extra confidence needed to know that all of the data has been destroyed from every sector. These certificates are especially useful for the e-recycling industry when re-selling those disks back into the market.

KillDisk also allows for the ability to clone a master disk or image to newly sanitized disks. Besides erasing the hard drives, you can use KillDisk to write an image or copy a master disk to freshly erased hard drives using the cloning feature.

All of this can be done remotely too.

Imagine that you’re out of the office for a few days and a junior tech is onsite in your absence, helping with some tasks that you would normally oversee. That same junior tech can insert the drives into the Destroyinator’s drive bays, and then you can remotely monitor the process from wherever you are located through a network interface.

Mixed configurations

No matter how many slots inside every one of our Destroyinator units, you can wipe the drives in mixed configurations. Whether they are mechanical drives, SAS drives, or solid-state drives, it doesn’t matter. They can all be wiped together—you don’t have to set things up so that it requires all of the drives to be the same kind and of the same size.

However, the duration of time it takes to completely wipe the drives will depend on the physical size of the hard drive. For example, no matter if you are wiping a single 1TB drive or 45 of them together, wiping one will take the same amount of time as wiping 45; assuming that the write performance of the drives is the same. The quantity inside, as we said, does not have an effect on that overall time.

Mixing sizes together, such as a batch of 2TB drives and a batch of 10TB drives can also affect how long it takes to wipe them too; however, if you want, you can batch them by capacity to make things move a bit quicker.

Like always, our support team is there on the other side. Ready and willing to support you when getting a Destroyinator unit up and running, or for any performance-type maintenance along the way…

Conclusion

Throughout this blog, we discussed the benefits of our Destroyinator unit and the power behind them to effectively and permanently destroy the data contained on hard drives.

We also talked about KillDisk software, and the power that brings.

For industries like e-recycling, health care, or even general IT operations, think of how easy it can be to thoroughly wipe data from hard drives using the Destroyinator. How quickly, how efficiently, and how securely that process is now.

Those advantages, combined with the costs saved on those recurring pay per wipe charges we mentioned, make the Destoyinator an ideal product for anyone who mindful of data destruction.

Your Destroyinator can pay for itself within a few months of running. Using our payback calculator, you can even see just how long it would take to see a return investment on your purchase.

Although the Destroyinator has been part of the 45Drives product line for a while, the functions it can perform, combined with the value it brings, makes the Destroyinator one of our most undervalued units.

With the hard drive landscape constantly changing, send us a message today if you have any questions, or think you could benefit from the advantages a Destroyinator provides.