Our County has amassed a lot of old CPUs that need to be disposed. Obviously, there is concern about the information that might be on the hard drives that is not public information.

Does anyone have any experience with this, and would you share what sort of arrangements have been made to safely dispose of old computers.

The cost and time to really erase the hard drives is probably prohibitive, given the number of these things that we have sitting in storage.

We have the same problem. Did you ever get an answer on this Jim?

The city of snyder has a special recycling center for electronics so they dont end up in the landfill.....we had all our departments reformat the hard drives before disposing of the old computers at auction or, for those that did not sell, recycling.
I believe the city program is funded by a grant from the state and they were happy to get the old monitors, etc. as it elevated their grant points.

Thanks, Mike. I was hoping there was an easy way to recycle them without going through the competitive bidding process.

We had a county sulpus auction and included the old CPUs in the auction...I think some of them went for $1.00 each and that was the high bid.....the rest were recycled.....In hindsight we would have been ahead just recycling all of them when you consider the manpower etc to get them to the auction.....The old monitors would not sell at all and we had a ton of them as well.
Good luck!

quote:

Originally posted by mhartman:
The city of snyder has a special recycling center for electronics so they dont end up in the landfill.....we had all our departments reformat the hard drives before disposing of the old computers at auction or, for those that did not sell, recycling.
I believe the city program is funded by a grant from the state and they were happy to get the old monitors, etc. as it elevated their grant points.

Just an FYI...reformatting the HDD does not remove the data....it is relatively easy to recover some if not most of the data. All depends on whats been done since the 'format'.

I understand.....we left it to each deaprtment how far to go in cleaning the hard drive, I personally used an overwriting program on those from my office.....cant remember the name of the program but I think the option i chose randomly re-wrote the hard drive a minimum of 9 times....it took quite a while, but made me feel better about letting them go.
Would a large magnet placed on the case beside the hard drive do the trick?
we discussed that in jest as we were selling them, since I am sure some of the departments did not put forth much effort in clearing the data.

For both my personal and County HDD's, I prefer to shatter the platter of the HDD with a hammer.

Quick, easy, low tech, and very effective.

When I worked in IT, prior to law, HDD disposal was always through brute force. A disk drive put through a drill press or hurled at the parking lot with sufficient force does the trick quite nicely.

The kind of magnet necessary to sufficiently degauss a modern HDD, especially through the case, isn't something you're likely to have lying around the office.

A bullet works nice as well, or so I have heard.

You could get with Best Buy and see who they use to dispose of their hard drives...they have the melted down. Also, the IT department could use a disk wipe program to remove information from the hard drives. The safest bet is to do a "DoD" or "NSA" type wipe which would consist of formatting the hard drive more than once...go for 7 or more to ensure info cannot be "carved" out.

There are companies that specialize in recycling and will provide you a certificate of destruction. I am familiar with one in Austin called Axcess Technologies. I think they have more than one location in Texas.