- Jul 19, 2009
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At our outpatient mental health/counseling facility we follow HIPAA regulations for protected health information, and as old devices & equipment becomes phased out we must render HDD's and memory useless such that protected health info. cannot be recovered from them. Does anyone know the best way to go about destroying hard disks and memory?
Some sources that say rubbing magnets over the surface of hard disk platters will scramble any data, and I've read others that say they won't. Some suggest drilling a couple holes in the platter, but say for example if you drilled a hole toward the outer edge of the platter couldn't data toward the inside still be accessed (maybe not very easily, but still)? As for the tiny platters from laptop HDD's they can be easily shattered with a hammer, desktop-sized HDD's not so much... and for RAM I figured snapping them in half would do the trick.
Anyone have any suggestions?
P.S. the only real documentation I could find from the HHS site is generic terms like "physical destruction may be appropriate"
Some sources that say rubbing magnets over the surface of hard disk platters will scramble any data, and I've read others that say they won't. Some suggest drilling a couple holes in the platter, but say for example if you drilled a hole toward the outer edge of the platter couldn't data toward the inside still be accessed (maybe not very easily, but still)? As for the tiny platters from laptop HDD's they can be easily shattered with a hammer, desktop-sized HDD's not so much... and for RAM I figured snapping them in half would do the trick.
Anyone have any suggestions?
P.S. the only real documentation I could find from the HHS site is generic terms like "physical destruction may be appropriate"
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