Computer hardware life span is approximately about 5 years only. After which most of the computer components fail for no reason at all. Thus, a schedule to replace aging computer part is very important. The computer part which easily gets obsolete or broken is the disk drives. Unreliable performance of the storage disk comes within 4 to 5 years of service.

We’ve experienced a degradation of our ERP server when a software RAID disk broke. The scary part was the management software for the RAID gives a segmentation fault error when run. This makes it impossible to have the software RAID be up again even the defective disk was replaced. The solution was the migration of the whole system to a virtual server machine.

The new ERP computer server running on the virtual container run smoothly afterwards. The broken storage disk was set to be discard, but it contains sensitive information. Wiping the data to prevent data recovery from the disk is a challenge. We would like to wipe disk partition and the computer operating system.

I have seen a simple USB gadget which can shred all sensitive files forever. The device was called TotalShredder USB key. It is a self-bootable USB which is even US military compliant. No need to worry about exposing sensitive data when discarding old disk drives. It securely deletes all data on the hard drive. Further, it guarantees that no data recovery software could ever retrieve files for discarded storage drives. This plug and play USB key which is extremely easy to use is a good tool for those who intends to discard data storage disk hardware.