A data center is decommissioning a batch of servers. The server drives must be physically destroyed according to company policy to ensure data is unrecoverable. The inventory of drives includes both older magnetic hard disk drives (HDDs) and newer solid-state drives (SSDs). A single destruction method must be used that is effective for both types of media. Which of the following media destruction methods should the administrator choose?
The correct answer is crushing. Crushing is a physical destruction method that applies immense force to bend, break, and shatter the internal components of a drive. This process destroys the magnetic platters in HDDs and the flash memory chips in SSDs, rendering data unrecoverable on both media types.
Degaussing uses a powerful magnetic field to erase data and is highly effective on magnetic media like HDDs and tapes, but it is completely ineffective on SSDs, which do not store data magnetically. Low-level formatting and disk wiping are software-based sanitization methods, not physical destruction methods, and may not be sufficient to render data completely unrecoverable.