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Degaussing is typically outsourced. Third-party companies buy the degaussing
equipment and perform the work, but this can lead to chain-of-custody issues.
Mechanical Shredding
Mechanical shredding is what it sounds like. Old hard drives are fed into a shredder and
they’re torn into a gazillion pieces. As with degaussing machines, you probably wouldn’t
buy one, but would rather outsource your drives to a shredder.
The benefit is obvious—someone would need tweezers, a microscope, glue, and a lot of
patience to get the hard drive back together.
The downside is similar to outsourcing to a degausser—chain-of-custody issues.
Secure Erase
So is there anything you can do that won’t let your data come back to haunt you? Yes.
A technology called Secure Erase was introduced in 2001. ATA and SATA drives contain
the technology to erase the data contained on them. But if this is such a great thing, why
haven’t you used it? That’s because it has been disabled by most motherboard BIOSs
probably because of concerns that a user might accidentally destroy data.

NOTE There is no way to recover from Secure Erase. Really. There’s no way to recover from Secure
Erase. PART III
In fact, the National Security Agency and the National Institute for Standards and
Testing have given Secure Erase a higher security rating than block overwriting software.
And remember how we warned about liability if financial and health data were ever
leaked? Secure Erase is approved to erase that data.
You can employ Secure Erase by downloading a Secure Erase utility that Dr. Gordon
Hughes (from the University of California at San Diego’s Center for Magnetic Recording
Research) helped develop. You can find more information and a download at Link 7-9.
To use it, follow these steps:

1. You need to know how to create a DOS boot disk and load the extracted
HDDerase.exe onto the bootable floppy disk.
2. Boot the computer from the floppy.
3. Make sure the boot priority setting is currently applied in your system’s BIOS.
4. Type hdderase at the system prompt.
5. All ATA hard drives connected to the system will be displayed.
6. Make sure the jumpers on the hard disk are correctly configured—that is, don’t set
the jumpers to CS (cable select). They should be set to “master” or “slave.”
7. Complete the utility.

NOTE It is likely that your computer does not have a floppy drive. If that is the case, burn
HDDerase.exe to a CD-ROM and boot from there.

Obviously, Secure Erase takes some technical know-how, but it is a less-expensive
method and takes less time. You also don’t have to worry about chain-of-custody issues.