Some of our colleagues have devices that drill and punch holes in hard drives. Then there\u2019s the Maxx Eguard\u2014a sort of mechanical cheese slicer that shaves off pieces of a hard drive, as slow as it is unreliable. We\u2019ve also seen some amazing degaussers with mysterious beams\u2014personally, I think those are more Yomanda\u2019s kind of thing. I wrote a blog post about this: WHY A DEGAUSSER NEVER WORKS.<\/a> IT Recycling uses a really industrial installation built into a truck. This shreds hard disks into 9mm pieces in about 3 seconds. Speed is extremely important. If you have a machine that can only process 100 disks per hour, even a very small stack of disks will keep you busy all day. The Maxx Eguard, in particular, is known for being extremely slow. Then the size of the shreds. You would think that for mechanical disks a shred size of 3cm or fine is fine, after all, the disk is really completely broken. This is not so. Data can still be extracted from large chunks of shredded mechanical hard disk. For mechanical hard disk, the requirement left and right is 11mm or smaller. IT Recycling shredded on site with 9mm. <\/p>\n That 9mm setting is really necessary for backup tapes because if you shred them into larger pieces, you’ll end up with very long strands of tape in the trash can. Read more about shredding TAPES here .<\/a> <\/p>\n For small data carriers like USBs and cell phones , credit cards etc it makes sense that you want to shred into small pieces. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s actually very simple: if you want to destroy a hard drive on-site, you have to chop it into very small pieces\u2014you need a shredder for that, and it\u2019s a really big, heavy machine. All other devices just don\u2019t work well. <\/p>\n
So you actually have two parameters, the SPEED and the SIZE of the chips. The speed and the size of the chips together make how much power, say power, a mobile shredder needs. <\/p>\n
Our shredder has a speed of 1,000 disks per hour, which is the fastest in Europe. <\/p>\n