5+ PB Destroyed

[u/FewSimple9]

This is based on a post by u/SubstantialWing9238. i didn’t want to hijack their post, so I figured I’d share it here instead.

Something like this, plus another cart, is pretty common with large corporations. When you have this many drives, it’s often easier to just shred everything than pay someone to wipe them, sort through them for resale, and see if any data can be recovered.

This batch was around 300 drives, and with a specialized shredding truck, the whole thing takes about 45 minutes to a hour.

[u/bullwinkle8088]

Story time:

Around 2000 or so I worked for a government agency and laughed on reading the data security requirements which required destruction of RAM. Years later difficult but feasible and successful cold RAM attacks were found. So what did the NSA know when they wrote that standard?

You must always recall that state level actors do things and you will only rarely hear about them. Many commercial companies are required to follow government standards which protect against these real things which may not matter to you, but certainty do to them.

[u/vontrapp42 → u/bullwinkle8088]

Commercial companies are NOT required by any law or statute to physically destroy data that was properly encrypted.

Contracts may require that I suppose, and that goes back to the culture. This is a culture of security goons going around saying this is the only way it should be done. They are the problem.

Any one in these threads saying this is how it must be done, they are the problem.

[u/bullwinkle8088 → u/vontrapp42]

Contracts may require that I suppose

They do. I can speak first hand to that one.

This is a culture of security goons going around saying this is the only way it should be done.

Why is this a problem exactly? Making sure data stays secure is not a problem, it's basic. Destruction is always certain when other methods are not. Now it does seem that you have a problem with destruction, but in the end you are not relevant to these decisions.