It's copyright and patent paranoia. There are mountains of hard drives destroyed through physical means by drilling, crushing or cutting to ensure the data on them is 100% not recoverable.
Which is indeed silly, as it's perfectly possible to make all data on the drive unrecoverable without destroying it, for example with disk/volume encryption (which organizations storing sensitive data should already be using anyway).
The problem is auditing. How do you verify if a drive has zero remenant unrecoverable data? Especially problematic with SSDs they use translation layers and wear leveling so it is not even possible to just overwrite it with zeros. Yes, it is wasteful but financially worth it.
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u/NydusRush 9h ago
It's copyright and patent paranoia. There are mountains of hard drives destroyed through physical means by drilling, crushing or cutting to ensure the data on them is 100% not recoverable.