Recycling Your Used Hard Drives A Guide to Data Erasure and Hard Drive Destruction

If you’ve got a bunch of old hard drives on your hands, you’re not alone. As we upgrade from one version of Mac OS to another, or we move from Windows XP to Windows 7, we often have hard drives left over. And while you might be tempted to keep them around in case you need them again someday, the truth is: they’re dangerous and need to be destroyed.

1. How to recycle old hard drives

Recycling your computer's old hard drive is an easy way to help the environment. Before throwing away your old hard drive, you'll want to make sure that you have removed any personal data from it. You can use a disk-wiping software to do this, which takes just a few minutes. And after you’re done, you can recycle the hard drive later at a recycling center.

2. The problems with hard drives

As a business owner, you can’t afford to lose any data. Here are two common scenarios where hard drives fail: 1) you’re backing up your data and something goes wrong - like the hard drive crashes, or the computer that is storing the data crashes.A burst of energy from the hard drive can rip through your data in an instant. The recovered data is gone. (Sound familiar?) Or maybe the hard drive you’re backing up the data to has begun to fail, but you can’t tell by checking the drive’s performance. The drive is unreadable and unaccessible. Maybe the hard drive is bad, or maybe you tried to format it for higher performance, but it didn't work. Either way, your data is gone. For this reason, it’s important to get data destroyed as soon as possible, preferably via scheduled deletion in an automated program like CrashPlan. 2) you’re moving a large quantity of data and don’t have space for it anymore - such as when you switch from Windows to Mac OS or when you use one version of a program over another. Just transferring or copying large files over or over again is not recommended; both can cause data corruption and loss. Keeping a large quantity of data on a hardDrive makes it more susceptible to data corruption or other catastrophic failures during data retrieval. While you can move your data if you have spare parts on hand, it's a bad idea to blindly store data on a hard drive you won't be able to access in a few months. Make sure you plan ahead by backing up good data first. Doing so will reduce your chances for losing valuable data.

Rebecca Kelley is the content marketing manager for Intego, a Mac software company. She also guest-blogs/freelances at various places and runs a couple hobby blogs for shits and giggles.

3. How to erase data from your old hard drives

If you’ve got some old hard drives lying around collecting dust, it’s important to erase the data on them so that no one can get to it. Whether you’re donating them, selling them, or getting rid of them, you need to make sure that your hard drives are wiped clean of any data.Here’s what the experts have to say about data on old hard drives and information security best practices for using hard drives.

Best Practice: When to Erase Data

Hard drive data may contain viruses, trojans, worms, or other malicious code that you don’t want anywhere near your computer. And while data on external hard drives is typically encrypted, that doesn’t prevent people from getting access to as much of your data as they want by hacking your Wi-Fi or hacking your network. If you don’t have a security software, it’s best to wipe your hard drive completely — at least, so there’s no chance for them to get in.

But what about data on your internal hard drives (like those from your RAID array)? Many organizations have recently made the switch to data encryption on all of their drives, but even a year later, there are penalties if you’re not doing it correctly. Encrypting your drives will eliminate your entire drive in San Francisco — at least if you’re consolidating drives from your primary RAID into a secondary one. Any data on there can be accessed, though it will be encrypted. But if you don’t get that covered up, you can’t use the data from your internal drives to help protect your data on an external one.

That said, it’s important to reformat the data so that it’s completely 100% error-free, which can safely be stored on a different hard drive. There’s also the option to make a backup, though keep in mind that the time you take to do it can be a significant time drain if you have many small files to back up.

4. Two methods for destroying your old hard drives

If you don’t want to get hacked, destroy your hard drives. If you don’t want to get hacked, destroy your hard drives. If you don’t want to get hacked, destroy your hard drives. If you don’t want to get hacked, destroy your hard drives.If you don’t want to get hacked, destroy your hard drives. Time to get an old-school data recovery!

As every Apple expert will repeatedly remind you: nothing can get your Mac running faster, everything can damage it, and almost everything can break it. If you look into the repair process without a lot of education, chances are, it quickly escalates from an “I want a part that has been fixed a million times” repair to an “I want something that I’d be embarrassed to have next to my printer” repair. These let the data get written on the volume in plaintext, records get deleted, and the machine sometimes won’t turn on anymore. If you’ve got old hard drives lying around, this is your one chance to make sure they aren’t holding back your MacBook Pro or your iMac.

There are tons of hard drive companies you can buy online, or ask your friendly neighbourhood Apple Store (which they most likely will let you do, knowing Apple). We’ve chosen Seagate’s highly-rated one, Seagate Backup Plus, but you may have better luck elsewhere if you want one of their most popular Drive options. Don’t get one of these brands and think your Mac is immune to data loss. As we’ve seen with the Surface Go 2, anything that makes life easier or faster for the company inevitably makes it easier and slower for you. Disable automatic updates, don’t install Apple tools (like Power Manager), don’t even install the Apple One app on your iCloud which automatically backs up your system, and if you want to help your Mac run more efficiently, opt for an external drive.

For more than a decade, the Go line of hard drives has been Seagate’s crown jewel.

Conclusion: You can’t just throw away a used hard drive; you need to properly erase the data and destroy the drive so that consumers can’t recover your sensitive information. This guide will teach you how to do it without breaking the bank.

The most important thing to remember is that you shouldn’t throw away a hard drive that still has data on it unless you know for sure that all the data has been erased. If you don’t properly erase the data, then it can be recovered and used to steal your identity.In other words, if you have potentially valuable or sensitive data on your hard drive, you should professionally shred it, throw it away, and get a new one. Here’s what you have to know.

First, if you still have a couple of hard drives that have data on them and you don’t know what to do with them, don’t fret. The vast majority of data on hard drives is unrecoverable. That means even if you took the drive out of your computer, pulled a disc out of it, or put a USB drive in it, none of those actually did any data damage.

It takes time and energy to erase a hard drive. The process is complex and it can take an awful lot of power to erase a hard drive, so if you’re using an old computer and it’s barely able to keep up with your usage, you may experience some issues.

The good news is that it’s much easier to erase data on modern computers than it was on earlier ones. Unfortunately, most modern computers don’t support the ability to directly erase a hard drive, so you’ll have to use a third-party software to do it.

One of the best options available is the SanDisk Secure Erase 4.0 program. It’s a fast and effective tool that can safely and effectively erase both hard drives and SD cards, eliminating the chance of recovering any evidence on the old data.

Unfortunately, the SanDisk program isn’t the only one you need if you want to erase your hard drives on an old computer; there are others to consider. The nine most popular third-party erase programs are listed below.

Euro Recycling is a not-for-profit company that is deeply entrenched in the security and anti-theft industry.