A systems administrator is decommissioning two dozen 3-TB enterprise SATA hard drives that once contained proprietary source code. Compliance officials state that the data must be unrecoverable even with state-of-the-art laboratory techniques and that any remaining metal should be sent to the company's approved electronics recycler. Power is still available in the rack room, but the maintenance window is limited to one hour. Which media-destruction method BEST meets the compliance requirement?
Run a single-pass zero-fill utility on each drive and log the completion reports.
Feed the drives through an industrial shredder that reduces them to small metal fragments before recycling.
Remove the controller boards and drill holes through the platters, then forward the housings to an e-waste vendor.
Expose each drive to a 5 kOe handheld degausser and ship the intact drives to the recycler.
Industrial shredding places the drive, including its platters, into a specialized machine that cuts the unit into very small metal and plastic particles. NIST SP 800-88 classifies shredding as a Destroy technique; once reduced to particles, no platter surfaces remain from which data can be reconstructed, and the fragments can be forwarded to an e-waste recycler. A single-pass overwrite is only a Clear action and can miss hidden or remapped sectors, so highly confidential data could still be recovered. Typical handheld degaussers (around 5 kOe) often lack the magnetic field strength required for modern high-coercivity drives, making them unreliable for guaranteed erasure. Drilling or crushing leaves large platter areas intact, allowing for potential forensic recovery. Therefore, shredding is the most appropriate choice given the time constraint and the requirement for definitive data destruction with recyclable scrap.