Magnetic storage declassification device
AssigneeIron Mountain Incorporated
InventorsThomas Delahunty, Eugene McCabe
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A media declassification device receives a media component such as a magnetic hard disk drive, and deletes data stored thereon by physical agitation and dismantling the media component. A cutting blade shears or grinds a perimeter region around a top of the hard disk drive (HDD drive, or simply drive) to a predetermined depth calculated to remove heads from screws and other fasteners securing a metal top panel. Inversion of the drive allows a magnetic media platter upon which data is stored to simply drop out. The magnetic platter is fed into a shredding device for obliteration to sufficiently small particles for declassification, while rare earth magnets are removed from the remaining drive chassis, and the now declassified chassis discarded into a recycling stream.
Claims11
A media declassification device for a hard disk drive (HDD), comprising:
- an agitator having a plurality of cutting edges configured to dismantle rigid materials;
- a guidance element configured to direct an enclosure of the HDD against the agitator;
- and
- a processor configured to execute a computer program to cause the media declassification device to:
- dispose, using the guidance element, the enclosure in communication with the agitator to engage a planar portion of the enclosure to dismantle the planar portion and liberating a magnetic platter from restraint by the enclosure;
- invert, using the guidance element, the enclosure to release the magnetic platter from the enclosure thereby resulting in a released magnetic platter;
- and
- dispose, using the guidance element, the released magnetic platter in communication with a fragmentation device, wherein the fragmentation device comprises rotating blades and a mesh screen, wherein the rotating blades are configured to fragment the magnetic platter, and wherein the mesh screen defines a predetermined passage size defining a maximum size of passed fragments.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.