When a drive is being retired, sold on, or has already surrendered everything it held, the data still needs to vanish — permanently, and in a way you can prove. We wipe hard drives and SSDs using the same forensic-grade kit we recover with, only pointed the other way: every sector overwritten, the result checked, and a certificate issued. The drive comes back blank and reusable; the data doesn’t come back at all.
Every drive is overwritten and then read back to confirm it — we verify there’s nothing recoverable left before a single certificate goes out.
A proper wipe is nothing like a quick format or a drag-to-the-bin delete — both of those leave the data sitting on the platters, waiting for a lab like ours to read it straight back. Forensic erasure overwrites every addressable sector on the drive, then makes a verification pass to confirm nothing readable came through. It’s the same class of hardware and software we use for recovery, aimed the opposite way, and it follows the recognised benchmark for media sanitisation (NIST 800-88). Once it’s finished, the drive reports clean, holds nothing, and can’t be brought back — not by us, and not by anyone with the same equipment.
On a spinning hard drive, a verified overwrite truly erases — the magnetic data is replaced and gone. SSDs and flash are the catch: their controllers spread data across spare cells and remap blocks out of sight, so a naive overwrite can leave whole regions untouched behind the scenes — looking wiped without being wiped. That’s why solid-state drives get a controller-level secure erase or cryptographic erase instead of a surface overwrite, clearing the mapping and the cells the drive actually uses. Knowing which method a given device needs is the entire job; getting it wrong is exactly how ‘destroyed’ data resurfaces on a resold laptop.
Most jobs come from the same short list of needs: retiring old drives, servers or laptops under GDPR and needing to prove the data’s gone; kit being resold, donated or recycled; a business clearing end-of-project material; or a drive that came in for recovery and now has to leave permanently dead. Each drive gets a certificate of erasure — serial, method and date — for your records and your auditors. Because a verified erasure leaves the hardware working, it’s cheaper and greener than shredding while the data is every bit as unrecoverable; where a client genuinely needs the media physically destroyed or shredded, we’ll point them to the right route. It’s the mirror image of our forensic recovery work — opposite ends of the same bench.
On a hard drive, yes — a verified overwrite replaces the data and there’s nothing underneath to bring back. On an SSD we use the controller’s own secure-erase rather than a surface pass, and either way we read the drive back and confirm zero recoverable data before the certificate is issued. We don’t certify what we haven’t verified.
Yes. Every drive is documented with a certificate of erasure listing the drive serial, the method used and the date — the paperwork a data-protection audit expects to see when hardware is decommissioned.
Sometimes. If the drive can be brought up far enough to erase, we do it and verify it. If the electronics or mechanics are too far gone to wipe safely in place, an overwrite isn’t possible and physically destroying the media is the honest route instead — we’ll tell you which applies and why, rather than issue a certificate we can’t stand behind.