How to Safely Dispose of Business, Corporate and Personal Hard Drives

Almost every computer and electronic device has some form of storage now and what people don't know is that getting this information off is actually incredibly easy in the right hands. Don't let your personal or business information get out into the wrong hands, you can take a few simple steps to safe guard your information and you don't even have to pay for it! Most companies destroy their own hard drives or try to wipe them by themselves. This sounds great for saving money and cutting costs but what happens when a hard drive is missed or something gets past the IT department who isn't trained in data removal, security and erasing? It could cost the company tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees if there is a lawsuit from sensitive personal information about employees or clients. If you don't want to risk this happening and aren't sure how to properly get rid of hard drive and gadget information you can choose to hire a company or actually have a company buy your old hard drives and computers from you.

Why Erasing Hard Drives is Expensive

Let's see why it is so hard to properly erase hard drives and why almost no one is doing it properly. The plain and simple answer is TIME! It takes an incredible amount of time to safely and securely erase the contents of a hard drive. It may sound simple or easy but if you're just using something like disk management on your computer to "reformat" your hard drive and erase the old partitions you are just waiting for an information catastrophe. Not only does this not erase your information but there are free programs anyone can use to simply see anything and everything that was on the hard drive prior to being formatted. If you don't have any important information like photos or documents on the computer it isn't a big deal, however in under about five to ten minutes it can all be viewed, copied, and saved. Most people choose to just destroy their drives with a magnet or shredder and this of course works very well but why just throw away hundreds or thousands of dollars every year when you upgrade laptops and desktops? Let's look at the other options. If you'd like to pay a company to come in and do a service like data removal and destruction there are certainly tons of companies you can pay out of pocket for this expense and a simple Google search or look in the phone book will find you plenty of results, but what if you want to get paid to sell old hard drives?

Companies Will Buy Your Old Hard Drives

This may sounds insane but there are companies who will buy your old hard drives, securely and 100% to your satisfaction erase all data and files for free? That means you don't have to pay the employees in your IT department or a private company, and they'll send you a check for the hard drives both laptop and desktop. That means you can now save and make money on both ends of upgrading your work computers and safely removing important company information. The best company I have found for this is Quick Laptop Cash, being a small publishing company we only have 6-7 employees but I have one computer I use for all payroll, HR, and other private company information I would never feel safe getting rid of so I typically pull the hard drive, memory sticks and other items and have them sitting in a closet at home. I wasn't sure what to do with these for the longest time because I had no idea how to properly dispose of my companies old information. I finally got tired of my ever growing pile of E-Waste and decided I'd find a way to either destroy them or clean them. Being environmentally friendly I first wanted to find the green and eco friendly way to erase them and keep these still working and in perfect condition hard drives in use. I figured I could use them as external hard drives for storage at work at the very least. I stumbled upon Quick Laptop Cash who offers to erase them up to FBI and CIA standards. I decided to look into what this means and without boring you it basically comes down to TIME like I said before, you can spend 5 minutes and think it's all erased and safe or you can buy the correct software, load each hard drive into a computer to run the software on the drive, wait while it does secure passes which typical companies want 5-7 secure erasing passes. Each pass takes 30-120 minutes depending on your hard drives size. This means a 250GB hard drive might take 12 hours to erase securely. It really takes too much time to do yourselves and they will even buy the hard drives from you. I now use it exclusively for my business and will only trust their certified technicians with my data. So if you're tired of a growing pile of digital information or just want to sell off a few old hard drives I'd take a look at Quick Laptop Cash first and see if they can help you with your data removal needs.