Your company has recently decommissioned a large number of hard drives and intends to give the devices to a recycling company. Before doing so, the company wants to ensure that all sensitive data on the drives is irretrievably destroyed to comply with data protection regulations. What is the most appropriate method for securing the data before giving the disks to a 3rd party?
Degaussing the hard drives to disrupt the stored data
Conducting a standard formatting of the hard drives
Physically destroying the hard drives by drilling
Performing a low-level formatting to prepare the hard drives for new data
Degaussing is the most appropriate method in this scenario. It uses a high-powered magnet to permanently disrupt the magnetic domains on hard drive platters, rendering the data unrecoverable and the drive unusable. This method is highly efficient for sanitizing a large number of magnetic drives at once before they leave the company's custody.
Standard formatting and low-level formatting are incorrect because they do not securely erase data, which can often be recovered with specialized software.
Physically destroying the drives by drilling is also a secure method. However, in the context of handing drives to a recycler, degaussing is often preferred as it sanitizes the data while leaving the physical device intact, which can simplify the recycling process. Given the 'large number' of drives, degaussing is typically a more efficient bulk sanitization method than drilling each drive individually.
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