Testing and Wiping Hard Drives - Any New Products?

Getting back into the game now, I still have all of my docking stations, and other systems I'm pulling out of boxes to get my drive testing and wiping stations up and running. I still have MediaTools Wipe to perform most of these duties for me, but I see that that product isn't even offered or supported anymore. Today, I noticed that StarTech offers a standalone wiping unit, though I don't know why I would choose that over a free computer and a bunch of docking stations...which still costs less.

Does anyone have anything else new that they are using that has come out in the past few years? I've searched around, and it all just seems like the same old stuff...especially with SSD having their own secure erase feature, I guess that is a niche that doesn't need anything else.

Originally Posted by hills

Just an opinion, but i think times are changing. HDD's and removable SSD's are on their way out. The consumer trend seems to be toward lightweight devices like tablets and iphones. Most of these have memory and storage soldered directly to the motherboard.

I had three Chromebooks come in this past week. They're rather neat. Lower cost and can go for up to 10 hours on a charge.

I suppose it is what it is.

It might not be wise to invest in a technology that's slowly becoming obsolete. I can remember a time when a 1Gb memory chip or a good CD/DVD drive were hot sellers but they have very little value now. It's likely to be the same with HDD's. There could come a time when there's no market share for anything smaller than 4TB.Those things would take forever to wipe.

I use a product suggested by another user on here. https://partedmagic.com/

It is $11 and a stand-alone OS (a slightly modified linux OS). I have run it off a thumbdrive and have it on a computer that I can plug up to 6 drives in at a time to wipe. I only do SATA secure erase. If a drive I get doesn't have a sata connection (IDE, SAS, etc), I just take the board off for scrap and drill through the rest of the drive. But for anything I resell or reuse I do secure erase.

I also agree with that the HDDs you get will be less over time. You'll see SSDs for a while and then you'll see m2 sata/nvme drives for a while then eventually no drives. and thats when itll suck as youll have to wipe on each device individually through its OS which may or may not be locked/pw protected.

Originally Posted by kss

I use a product suggested by another user on here. https://partedmagic.com/

It is $11 and a stand-alone OS (a slightly modified linux OS). I have run it off a thumbdrive and have it on a computer that I can plug up to 6 drives in at a time to wipe. I only do SATA secure erase. If a drive I get doesn't have a sata connection (IDE, SAS, etc), I just take the board off for scrap and drill through the rest of the drive. But for anything I resell or reuse I do secure erase.

I also agree with that the HDDs you get will be less over time. You'll see SSDs for a while and then you'll see m2 sata/nvme drives for a while then eventually no drives. and thats when itll suck as youll have to wipe on each device individually through its OS which may or may not be locked/pw protected.

That's great, I will check it out, thanks!

Originally Posted by kss

I use a product suggested by another user on here. https://partedmagic.com/

It is $11 and a stand-alone OS (a slightly modified linux OS). I have run it off a thumbdrive and have it on a computer that I can plug up to 6 drives in at a time to wipe. I only do SATA secure erase. If a drive I get doesn't have a sata connection (IDE, SAS, etc), I just take the board off for scrap and drill through the rest of the drive. But for anything I resell or reuse I do secure erase.

I also agree with that the HDDs you get will be less over time. You'll see SSDs for a while and then you'll see m2 sata/nvme drives for a while then eventually no drives. and thats when itll suck as youll have to wipe on each device individually through its OS which may or may not be locked/pw protected.

I agree that things are moving in that direction. I had started to get some SSDs, more tablets and tons of stupid chromebooks. However, the bulk of what I can get are not from business upgrade pickups. So, I get a lot of old stuff. I have 50 486 and earlier machines that I had grabbed from the warehouse and stored in my garage... I will be going through those here sometime soon.

There is a market for IDE and SCSI drives, going all the way up to $100 each for the right ones. No one takes the time to save them, so people running old equipment will pay top dollar for a quality used drive. I had a regular customer that bought every 30GB IDE drive I got at around $15 each. SATA drives had quickly become useless right around when I shut down unless they were sold in large lots.

I adapted to my situation, and learned a lot about what sells in "obsolete" equipment. Shipping worldwide also helps.

The ewaste and hard drive trends are definitely moving in an interesting/concerning direction. I don't see desktops completely going away, but definitely less than in previous decades. I've also seen everything starting to have more plastic and less metal/boards.

In the past few years of recycling electronics I've seen several companies move their employees to working from home on a tablet instead of operating out of a massive office building. It saved them a ton of money on rent and overall operational expenses. With the whole covid thing I could see more companies doing that instead of moving employees back in. Out of the 5 past sales for monitors, 4 out of 5 people buying were looking to hook them up to their laptops.

I hate to say it, but the only markets that won't really be affected by digital everything are the hazardous waste disposal and medical waste disposal industries. I would say paper shredding would be a good one, but with everything moving to the cloud that is a dwindling market too.