You’re getting a new computer, or just replacing your hard disk drive (HDD) with a solid-state drive. What do you do with your old storage media?  This is one of the most common questions we receive — and it’s an...

You should never toss a hard drive into a dumpster — hard drives are recyclable, and given that we create more than 59 million tons of electronic waste every year, every bit of recycling counts (pardon the pun).  But while...

Several standards exist for secure data/media sanitization, but the most commonly cited standards are NIST SP 800-88.  Published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), SP 800-88 defines processes for destroying data on hard disk drives (HDDs) and...

Degaussing is a data sanitization procedure that destroys data by applying powerful magnetic fields. Here’s how the process works.

No, magnets will not damage solid-state drives. However, changes in magnetic fields might cause data loss under certain circumstances. Strong magnetic fields can destroy data on hard disk drives (HDDs) and data tapes, for a simple reason: Those devices use...

I recently was asked to contribute to a discussion on the IT social community of Spiceworks. It started out as a question about disk formatting utilities, but by the end of the discussion, users were trying to determine what the...