Hard Drive Destruction in Houston

In order to be compliant with Texas and federal privacy laws, your hard drives must to be destroyed before they leave your possession. That’s because digital files are fully recoverable from an old hard drive, even if you’ve removed them from the drive.  Simply wiping a hard drive clean of your files is not enough to ensure they cannot be recoverable.

You cannot reasonably ensure your security without physically destroying old hard drives. Houston Document Shredding’s contractors offer hard drive shredding—they can destroy your hard drive on-site or at a secure plant, after which, they melt down your pieces and recycle what is left over. There will be no question about your security after their destruction.

Don’t forget about hard drives hidden around your home or office that are also at risk! In 2010, Affinity Health Plan discovered the consequences of failing to destroy hard drives in copiers and scanners they were leasing when thousands of their clients’ records were discovered on these drives. Don’t make that same mistake. Hard drives are hidden all around your home and office in many of the electronic devices that you use, simply because many of these devices need a hard drive in order to operate. Here a list of some electronic devices you might have forgotten about:

• Legacy magnetic media—floppy drives, zip disks, and magnetic tapes
• Memory cards—SD, SDHC, MMC, compact flash, microdrive, and memory sticks
• RAM and ROM-based storage devices
• Optical media—CDs and DVDs
• USB removable media—pen drives, thumb drives, flash drives, and sticks
• Fax machines, scanners, copiers, and printers
• PC hard drives
• Biomedical devices—physiologic monitors, infusion pumps, ventilators, MRI, CT, and diagnostic ultrasound and laboratory analyzers
• Embedded flash on boards and devices—motherboards and peripheral cards such as network adapters or any other adapter containing nonvolatile flash memory
• Mobile devices—cell phones, smart phones, PDAs, tablets and laptops

Upon destruction, you will receive a certificate of destruction that indicates the process has been completed. This certificate is good to maintain records, especially if following a legal regulation such as HIPAA. The process is entirely secure and confidential, and after the certificate is delivered, you know for a fact that your electronic information is eternally safe.