Hard drive destruction service

When you delete files or reset a computer, the data stays on the drive, and it can often be brought back. A 2017 study had people buy second-hand devices online, and 40% of them still held personal details that could be recovered.

After a drive leaves you, there's no telling who might try to read it. Shredding puts the data beyond recovery, so it's best to get it done before you hand a drive over to anyone.

You can go about this in 2 ways. Mobile shredding brings a truck to your door, and you can stand there while each drive is destroyed. The other option is sending your drives to a secure facility elsewhere to be shredded.

Both routes should end with a certificate of destruction in your hands. That's a written account of who touched the drives from pickup onward, along with what got destroyed, and the time and place. A good certificate also covers the method, the equipment involved and how the outcome was verified. Give us your drive count and location, and nearby firms will send you quotes.

Solid state drives are the newer sort, and instead of a spinning disk they keep your data on tiny chips. Those chips pack information tightly, so the pieces must be very small to prevent data recovery. If your drives are this kind, ask the firms about their shred sizes first, then pick one.

Hand over more drives at once and the price per drive usually drops. Quotes from us cost nothing, so you can weigh up prices first.

SERI oversees R2v3, which was adopted in June 2020. A firm holding it has to wipe data in line with the NIST guideline from the US government. It also has to keep track of where your equipment ends up once it leaves.

e-Stewards asks more. It insists on NAID AAA backing for data security, which helps explain the higher prices you'll often see from these firms. Each firm replies with a price and details of the certificates it issues for the work, which are separate from the certifications the firm itself holds.

NIST, the US standards agency, defines this kind of removal by how much effort it would take to get at the data, it should be beyond reach at that level. Its current guideline was published in September 2025, and it lays out 3 levels:

• Clear overwrites all the storage you can normally get at.
• Purge goes further, putting the data out of reach of even a lab kitted out with advanced equipment.
• Destroy physically breaks the drive down, shredded, burned, crushed or melted.

Shredding sits in Destroy, the toughest of the 3.