Hard Drive Destruction
Your old hard drive still remembers everything. We make it forget.
Every hard drive being replaced, recycled or scrapped is a live copy of whatever was ever written to it. We destroy them beyond recovery — magnetically, and physically where required — with a certificate to prove it.
The problem
Formatting does not erase a hard drive.
A deleted or formatted hard drive still holds recoverable data — the only way to guarantee it is unreadable is to destroy it properly.
- Deleting or formatting a drive changes almost nothing on the platters. The data is still there, and can often be recovered — by a competent data thief, or by a lab like ours.
- You remain responsible under GDPR for personal, client or financial data on any drive you dispose of, recycle, or return to a leasing company.
- Software wiping is slow and unreliable on a failing drive. A drive that will not boot cannot be wiped by software at all — but it can still be degaussed.
Degaussing exposes a drive's magnetic platters to an intense, fluctuating magnetic field that resets them to a neutral state. The data is gone, and the drive itself will no longer initialise. This applies to magnetic media only — hard drives, backup tapes and floppy disks. SSDs and flash storage need a different process, covered on our wider certified data destruction page.
Process
Logged, degaussed, certified.
- 01
Scan & log
Every hard drive's serial number is scanned and recorded against a certificate of destruction. No serial number visible? We apply a security tag and log that instead.
- 02
Degauss
The drive goes into our degausser — approved by NATO and the UK government, and meeting US Department of Defense and NSA standards. The magnetic field is released in under a second.
- 03
Verify
The drive is confirmed dead: it will spin up but cannot initialise, because the system data it needs just to boot has been erased along with everything else.
- 04
Certify
A red tag marks the drive as destroyed, and you receive a certificate recording the serial number, brand, date and method — on the spot, or within 24 hours.
Capability
In our lab, or at your offices.
In-lab degaussing
Bring drives, tapes or whole machines to our secure premises at 117 Ormeau Road, Belfast, for degaussing under laboratory conditions.
On-site & mobile
Our mobile unit degausses drives at your own offices anywhere in Northern Ireland — useful when equipment cannot leave the building.
Degaussing & shredding
For organisations that need physical destruction as well as magnetic erasure, we combine degaussing with shredding — on-site, off-site, or split across both.
SSDs & flash media
Degaussing does not touch solid-state storage. SSDs and flash drives are securely wiped and physically destroyed instead — ask us about the right method for a mixed estate.
Learn more →Questions
What clients ask before instructing us.
Will a degaussed hard drive still work afterwards?
No — that is the point. It will spin up but cannot initialise, because degaussing destroys the low-level system data the drive needs just to start reading itself, along with everything else on the platters.
Can you degauss an SSD or NVMe drive?
No. Degaussing only works on magnetic media — hard drives, backup tapes and floppy disks. SSDs and flash storage have no magnetic platters to reset, so they are securely wiped and physically destroyed instead. See our data destruction page for the full method.
What does the certificate of destruction actually prove?
It records the drive's serial number (or security tag if none was fitted), its brand, the date of destruction and the method used. It is your evidence of compliant disposal for a client, an auditor or the ICO.
A drive due for destruction might still have data we need — what do we do?
Stop, and tell us before it goes anywhere near the degausser. We can recover the data first through our hard drive recovery service, then destroy the drive once you have what you need.
Do you destroy drives on-site, or do we have to send them to you?
Either. Our mobile unit degausses drives at your premises anywhere in Northern Ireland, or you can bring them to our secure lab at 117 Ormeau Road, Belfast.
Degaussed to a NATO and UK government-approved standard, logged and certified — in our Belfast lab or at your offices. Part of our wider digital forensics and eDiscovery work for solicitors, businesses and public sector clients.