People are killing innocent old hard drives. Those millions are lost in the unsubstantiated belief that churning them actually prevents the data left there from being recovered or stolen. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. So why are 90% of all discarded data center HDDs shredded each year?
according to BBC news, this is a question that members of the Circular Drive Initiative (CDI) have been asking for some time. CDI is essentially on the verge of dying, driven by a passion for reuse and minimizing e-waste, despite the general consensus that hard drives are predicted to be history after 2028. A collection of technology companies united to fight for the world’s HDD. .
Companies involved in CDI include Seagate, Western Digital, Micron, and blockchain-centric Chia Network, where my new hard drive hero, Jonmichael Hands, works.
As CDI’s secretary and treasurer, he spoke to IT Asset Disposal (ITAD) companies about how they can reclaim and reuse old data center drives so they don’t go to waste. He waved his hand in apology. He said, “Sorry, I have to shred the old drive.”
“One ITAD provider said they shred five million drives for one customer,” says Hands. It’s a farce if you ask me. More importantly, this rather extreme so-called “zero-risk” solution to discarded HDDs is not without its problems.
After all, there are many more dangers lurking in the pile of crushed metal.
Even if you simply throw away the old hard drive, it’s possible that someone with the know-how can recover the remaining data. That’s why you still hide a bunch of spinning platter babies in your kit cupboard, right?
What you may not be aware of is that someone known as a hooded hacker could take a piece of a small dish, as small as 3mm, and potentially get some data out of it. Small amounts aren’t dangerous, but with enough time and dedication, you can certainly produce a picture worthy of some kind of ransom.
So what is the ITAD excuse to multi-up all those hard drives?
When the IEEE Standards Association recently approved a long list of safe methods for permanently erasing leftover data rather than chopping it up into small pieces, there’s no excuse.
The safe method is called purging. There are several ways to do this, but one easy way is to overwrite the data with new data patterns. It will take some time, but it seems relatively easy. Cryptographic erasure works, but it’s even better. Mysterious. The latter is a faster method and simply removes the encryption key, rendering the data unintelligible to even the most sophisticated hackers.
“The era of the ‘take, make, dispose’ linear economy needs to end,” said Amy Zuckerman, Seagate’s director of sustainability and transformation. Seagate is one of the companies focused on taking parts from old, broken (and therefore unpurgeable) hard drives and recycling the unusable ones.
Let’s hope CDI can get more companies on board. Because e-waste is actually an untapped source of rare earth materials.