This February Commonwealth Computer Recycling is celebrating our fourth year in business! To say thank you to all our clients, we have a tremendous special - we are waiving all recycling and pick-up fees for the month! Yes, that's correct, in February you can recycle your computers securely and safely at no cost whatsoever!

For free pick-up, minimum twenty computers - no charge for drop-off. Serialized data destruction reports are $1 per hard drive. No televisions.

That hard drive in the picture above looks really beaten up - the platters are bent, maybe even broken. You might think that data it contains had been safely destroyed. But you would be wrong.

Forensic data recovery has come a very long way. This article
from Techworld profiles a UK based company named Kroll who have managed to recover data from drives dropped from three stories up, soaked in pitchers of beer and other horrendous abuses.

But what about those broken platters? If they can't spin the drive up after fixing mechanical damage, it's truly dead, right? Not if the the forensic specialists use magnetic force microscopy. This is a new data recovery technology that allows data to be recovered from the drive platter even if it has been shattered - each piece can have the data read from it indiviually by the MFM device.

So don't be misled by visible damage to a drive. To reiterate what we've said before, the only truly certain methods of destroying data are degaussing (demagnetizing) the drive, or a multi-pass DOD overwrite of the data on the drive. Hitting it with a hammer, crushing it or drilling holes just do not get the job done - and can be surprisingly easy to overcome.

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