Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Shredding a hard drive?

I recently experienced one of those "now I have seen everything" moments. The town of Acton, MA has just implemented a program to shred hard drives. Yes, you read that right. I have been in the computer business for 44 years and did not know that such a thing as a Hard Drive Shredder existed!

A company named SEM in Westboro, MA makes several devices for this purpose, but the Town of Acton decided upon the SEM 0300. I have seen it, touched it, and used it to shred several of my own old hard drives.

Why would someone want to shred a hard drive, and what does that mean? Well, first of all if you think of all of the possible Government uses for such devices, the list would be endless. And how about us, the residents of the Town of Acton (and elsewhere)? The answer becomes more obvious every day if you read the papers or listen to the news or browse the web. Privacy. Security. Identity Theft. These probably ring a few bells.

Before you toss out that old computer, and the Town of Acton makes this easy to do at the Town's Transfer Station, think about the data that might still be on your hard drive, and if you have the least amount of concern about this, as I think most of us do or should, then shredding your hard drive is the answer.

The Model 300 will easily and quickly devour your hard drive and turn it into lots of unusable and very small pieces (see attached photo). It really is quite amazing and so easy to do, and works for 2.5 inch (laptop PC) and 3.5 inch (desktop PC) hard drives. I would encourage all residents of Acton to take advantage of this new Town service. Where, you might ask?

The answer is at the gate house at the entrance to the Town of Acton Transfer Station, just off Route 2. Stop at the gate house, complete a brief Hard Drive Destruction Release Form, and pay the attendant $10 for the service (these machines are VERY expensive as you can see from the SEM web site and the Town wishes to have the machine pay for itself). Please note: as I write this the form is not yet online. If, when it goes online, it is located in a different web location, I will update the link. My thanks to John Bailey at the Transfer Station (pictured below) who is holding a handful of shreds (former hard drives) and posing next to the SEM 0300 (yes, it is a small machine and surprisingly quiet too!).


For any technical questions regarding how to remove your hard drive from your computer, please contact me at 781-898-4060 or pcdoc@brpcdoc.com.

1 comment:

  1. We have been using this model for a couple of month to works perfectly and we have been shredding a lot of hard drives through it. We had over 600 hard drives to shred last week it was a bit crazy dealing with all the scrap metal.

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