Hard-Drive Shredders: the people who get to smash computers for living

151 harddrive.JPGI’ve always been entranced by shredders: reducing piles of documents into wood pulp. But, as few people use paper these days things have moved on in the shredding world.

Shredding company Shred Easy have moved into the more lucrative and up-to-date market of hard drive shredding. Despite a business strapline which reads: “Paper Shredding is the secure and most effective solution” – it’s launching a hard drive-shredding business and just landed contracts with four BT data centres. Clearly BT have some hard disks they want broken into tiny pieces. Can you imagine? Silicon everywhere.

We imagine it looks a bit like this:

I guess the attraction of shredding is best exemplified by the youtube guy with a food processor who used to shred things – an iPhone, famously. Destructive of course but strangely compelling.

Less exciting to watch but more useful would be internet erasers who could remove all traces of a particular piece of data from internet – though you’d need to hack into multiple secure servers to achieve to achieve that completely.

We leave you with the distressing image of a shredded and non-shredded hard drive:
151 harddrive_destruction_big.jpg

Anna Leach

2 comments

  • Like you said – compelling video! But it’s a serious subject. Identity theft and fraud has probably seen the biggest rise amongst all the crimes in the last 5 years so it is essential to correctly dispose and destroy data on electronic devices such as hard drives, CDs and flash drives.

Comments are closed.