EDR Hard Disk Crusher

You don’t need to run an illegal gambling ring out of your basement or pirate hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of software to be concerned about the contents of an old hard drive after you throw it away. Even if you just use your computer to buy ceramic cats on eBay, it’s still probably littered with sensitive information, from credit card and social security numbers, to the angry letter to you wrote to cat_lady992 and never sent.

There are many cheap ways to clean up a drive before tossing it, which we’ve covered in our how-to guide on the subject, but if “cheap” isn’t in your vocabulary, and big, damage-inflicting machines are more your style, EDR Solutions has just the trick: its 142-pound mechanical hard disk crusher.

Yes, a hard disk crusher. EDR’s foot-and-a-half-tall behemoth uses a hydraulic piston to completely obliterate drives, warping the platters and irreversibly damaging all the data they store. Pop a drive into its Lexan-shielded crushing chamber, press a button, and a nasty steel cone punches it flat, wiping everything it has ever held has been off the face of the Earth forever. EDR says its insatiable machine can chew through up to 60 drives an hour.

EDR Hard Drive Crusher
Image Courtesy of EDR

If this all seems a little excessive, consider the drawbacks of conventional methods. A simple format does next to nothing for you in the hands of anyone with the basic ambition to access your data, and better methods of “digital” hard drive destruction, like writing the drive with seven passes of binary garbage, take a very long time. Even swiping the drive under a powerful magnet holds no guarantee of successfully wiping out everything, since modern drives have potent magnetic shielding to protect them.

When efficiency and effectiveness are priorities, mechanical destruction is the only way to go. Individuals can accomplish this with any number of methods, from taking the drive apart and spreading its platters to the four corners of the Earth, to simply drilling a lot of holes in it, but EDR’s crusher has been built for businesses with a lot to destroy. After all, data destruction for them can turn into a liability. If you think having your own credit card number stolen would be a hassle, imagine when it’s 5,000 credit card numbers, and they belong to customers.

The EDR hard disk crusher’s $11,500 price tag is sure to keep it mostly in the hands of businesses who need mass driving crushing on demand. But then again, there are always individuals with a little too much money to throw around, or a little too much “private data” to worry about, so we won’t rule out individual ownership based on price alone. More information can be found at EDR’s Web site.

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