cctalk Digest, Vol 101, Issue 57

--- On Thu, 1/19/12, William Donzelli <wdonzelli at gmail.com> wrote: Having worked at a recycler many years ago, yes, we did have such a machine. But it was only used if the client paid extra - a fair bit extra - for special secure destruction. Not only does the machine use a massive amount of power, but the shredded drives are/were worth a fair bit less than the non-shredded ones even as scrap. All re-usable drives were one pass wiped/tested for resale as drives. Any junk drives were just tossed in a big bin and sold by the pound. For the normal person off the street paying us to recycle a PC, there was no expectation of any kind of data security. Same with corporate customers that did not pay extra for any kind of special handling. Most corporate customers were "secure wipe" jobs - we booted the entire machines up with a floppy that ran a DoD 7 pass wipe on the drives. These were almost always massive PC replacement projects - so we'd get three pallets of identical Pentium III machines. We'd hook them up, clean/test/wipe, then sell them in bulk to resellers of used PC's. Only the faulty drives were shredded in this case. -Ian