Seagate Releases Data Destruction Software

By Greg McNevin

April 11, 2008: Aiming for greater security when disposing of old IT equipment, Seagate Recovery Services has introduced three new data erasure products that use a series of algorithms to erase all data from a disk drive to ensure sensitive information does not get into the wrong hands.

While compliance and archival issues are top of mind for many, a large number of industries also face legal regulations when it comes to the destruction of data. With personal and corporate data increasing at exponential rates and sensitive information increasingly being stored on local PCs or notebooks, organisations need to properly dispose of data so that they do not risk exposure when retiring old equipment.

Seagate says its Data Erasure products deliver some of the fastest erasing speeds in the industry, and also provide a Certificate of Erasure so organisations can recycle, repurpose or dispose of hard disks without losing sleep over whether or not the old data is gone for good.

The products offer a choice of 13 data erasure programs, including NSA, DoD, US Armed Services, NCSC, NATO and Gutmann recommended methods, and have been designed for a variety of uses – such as erasing a single disk, or erasing a large inventory of disk drives over a network.

“Our internal studies show that more than 50 percent of drives returned from customer data centres were not properly erased and still contained corporate data,” said Jay Remley, president of the Seagate Recovery Services business unit of the Seagate Services Group.

“With the growing amount of information kept on personal computers, sensitive customer and corporate data must be securely managed from the time it is created until it is destroyed.”

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