Protect Your Identity, Destroy Your Old Hardrives!

If you want to protect your identity, you must take extreme measures and destroy your old hardrives. Identity theft is on an upward climb, and if you don’t take precautions, your hardrive could end up in the wrong hands. If you are thinking of donating them or taking a trip to your local recycling facility, I’d think twice about it!

The only way that you can be sure that your data won’t end up in the wrong hands, is to destroy your hardrive. This means, that you must physically destroy the drive by breaking and bending it’s platters. There are several ways to destroy the platters, and I will list a couple of the most popular ways to do it.

* Drill several holes through the hardrive.
* Beat it up with a big hammer or sledge hammer.

- – However, whatever method that you decide on, be sure to take the proper safety precautions to avoid personal injury. – -

You are probably asking yourself, if you really need to take such extreme measures to destroy your hardrive? It depends solely upon you! Can you afford to have your personal data resurface, recovered, or in the hands of an identity thief?

Another issue that needs to be addressed, is hardrives that are under warranty. You send you hardrive back to get a replacement, and you expect that your data will be erased properly by the manufacture. Right? I would think about that one again!
If your drive crashes and you take it into your local repair center, they will most likely replace your hardrive for free, if it is under warranty. They will more than likely keep your old hardrive unit and assure you that your data will be in safe hands and destroyed. However, there are a lot of people who have reported that their crashed/defective hardrive managed to get back out on the resale market. In fact, they have reported that they were even contacted by the person who just purchased their old hardrive. Therefore, your personal data/information was obtained from the hardrive and wasn’t destroyed as you were told! Scary, isn’t it?

The only way to protect your data from being seen by other people is to destroy it. Therefore, if your hd crashes or fails, I would tend to think it would be better to purchase another new drive and keep your old one for proper disposal. Get out your biggest hammer and smash the hardrive into pieces, and avoid smashing your FINGERS!

Hope this blog post was helpful to you, “Protect Your Identity, Destroy Your Old Hardrives!”

Spunky Jones.