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GCN Home > 04/30/07 issue

Clean sweep

Permanently removing data from old hard drives is harder than you might imagine

By William Jackson, GCN Staff

Completely removing data from a modern hard drive is a difficult thing to do, which can be a blessing when your drive crashes or you hit the Delete button at the wrong time. But it becomes a double-edged sword when it’s time to decommission an old computer.

“When we turn in a computer, we have to take the hard drive out,” said Derrick Bell, who leads automation acquisition at the Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. “We were keeping all of our drives — just storing them. We had some units that had a roomful of drives.”

According to industry estimates, more than 200 million hard drives with an estimated life of five years each were shipped in 2002. Do the math and you can see that a whole lot of drives are approaching the end of their useful lives.

The Defense Department requires overwriting a disk three times to eliminate data classified as secret, a process that can take hours or even days on a large drive. DOD requires the physical destruction of hard drives containing higher-classified data.

The Army is touchy about letting even unclassified data out of its hands, so the handling of old hard drives is a difficult subject.

“You can’t just throw them in the trash can,” Bell said. “We even shred every bit of paper.”

You can also shred a hard drive, but it’s not cheap or easy. The danger of hazardous materials in the devices means that specialized companies usually do the shredding, and drives carrying classified data cannot easily be shipped to third parties for shredding. The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command in San Diego had to ship hard drives being decommissioned to the National Security Agency by classified courier for disposal.

“We are research and development,” said Dan Angeles, physical-security specialist at Spawar, where the power users frequently upgrade their information technology systems.

“They go through computers like it’s nothing. People always had hard drives sitting in their areas.”

The persistence of memory
Classified couriers are expensive, so Spawar officials did a cost analysis and decided that a $48,000 high-end degausser was a more cost-effective option.

More news on related topics: IT Security, Content / Record Management, Data Management, Defense IT, Hardware, IT Management



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