Whether you plan to sell an old drive, retire it from use, or it has already given up everything it stored, the information on it has to go away forever, and you need to be able to prove it has gone. That’s why we use the same forensic-grade tools we recover data with, turned to the opposite purpose, to carry out complete forensic wipes of hard drives and SSDs. Every sector is overwritten, we verify that the wipe worked, and a certificate is issued. The end result is an empty, fully reusable drive. The data never comes back.
We read back every drive after it has been wiped. This proves that no recoverable data remains before any certificate leaves our lab.
Reformatting a drive or deleting files does nothing to the data itself. It only removes the link to it, and the actual data still sits on the platters waiting to be retrieved by a lab such as ours. A full forensic wipe is entirely different: it overwrites every addressable sector on the drive and then runs a verification pass to confirm that none of the original data survived. Think of the recovery gear and software we use every day, now used to destroy data instead of retrieving it. Our wipes follow the NIST 800-88 guidelines for media sanitisation, which set out two levels: Clear, a single overwrite pass that defeats any software-level recovery, and Purge, a controller-level erase that defeats even a laboratory. On any drive built this century, one verified pass is enough; the old thirty-five-pass routines were designed for the low-density platters of the 1990s and have not been needed since. Once the wipe is complete and verified, the drive is blank and its data will not come back, not for us and not for anyone else with the same equipment.
This is where the two types of media part ways. When a spinning hard drive is overwritten and verified, its magnetic data is replaced and gone. SSDs and flash are where things get slippery: their controllers spread data across spare cells and quietly remap blocks out of view, so a blunt surface overwrite can pass straight over whole regions, leaving a drive that looks wiped when it isn’t. That is why solid-state drives need a controller-level secure erase or a cryptographic erase instead of a surface pass, clearing both the mapping table and the cells the drive actually uses. A secure erase uses the drive’s own ATA Secure Erase or NVMe Sanitize command to wipe every cell the controller manages, spare cells included. A cryptographic erase destroys the internal media-encryption key, so the ciphertext left behind in the NAND becomes unreadable immediately. Choosing the right method for your device is the whole job; choose wrongly, and “destroyed” data can resurface on a laptop after it has been sold on.
Almost all cases come down to one of a few scenarios: hardware being retired (drives, servers or laptops) that falls under GDPR and needs to be proven erased; hardware being sold, donated or recycled; a business clearing out material at the close of a project; or a drive that came in for recovery and now needs to leave permanently dead. Whichever it is, each drive leaves with a certificate of erasure recording its serial number, the erasure method and the date, which is the paper trail your records and your auditors will expect. When magnetic media cannot take an in-place overwrite, the next option is degaussing: a field strong enough to saturate the platters and remove the servo tracks. This clears the data completely, but it also leaves the drive unusable. A verified erasure, by contrast, leaves the hardware working; it is a cheaper and greener alternative to shredding, with the data every bit as unrecoverable, and if a client does need media physically shredded or destroyed, we will point them to the right route. It is the mirror image of our forensic recovery service: the same bench, worked from the opposite end.
Yes. On a hard drive, a verified overwrite writes over the data, and nothing remains beneath it that could be recovered. On an SSD, we run the controller’s own secure-erase command instead of a surface pass. Either way, the drive is read back and verified to contain no recoverable data before any certificate is issued. We will not certify what we have not verified.
Yes. We issue a certificate of erasure with each drive, recording its serial number, the method used and the date, which is exactly the documentation a data-protection audit looks for once hardware has been decommissioned.
Sometimes. When we can get the drive running well enough to erase it, we do so and verify the result. When the mechanical components or electronics have deteriorated so badly that wiping in place would be unsafe, the honest option is to destroy the media physically. We will tell you which case applies and why, rather than hand over a certificate we cannot stand behind.