Why NextUse Hard Drive Quality Surpasses the Competition
By James Mannering, Hard Drive Product Manager at NextUse
Remarketing, the reselling of end-of-life or retired IT assets like hard drives, is an extremely competitive and cost-sensitive industry. Thousands of companies all over the world buy and sell hard drives, including brokers that simply act as a middleman connecting buyers and sellers. Oftentimes these drives have not had the data wiped off them, have large amounts of bad sectors, or do not work at all. This is an industry defined by the term “caveat emptor” (let the buyer beware), and it requires the use of payment methods that can be refunded in case the product that received is not what was advertised.
For example, we recently got a large shipment of hard drives that were supposed to be “tested, working.” But it turns out that our equipment couldn’t even recognize the hard drives because they had been degaussed and were essentially paperweights.
Most marketers are simply that: they don’t recycle, and some don’t even have any data security or data destruction capability, they just buy and sell drives. And in order to stay profitable in an industry with constantly changing drive values and tight profit margins, they don’t invest a penny more than they have to in hardware and software.
Among companies that do offer “data destruction” services, most do so without any certification, training, oversight, or qualifications of any sort. Many simply drop the data-bearing drives into a shredder and physically destroy them, which unnecessarily burdens a broken and overloaded global recycling system. Although some vendors claim to “wipe,” “sanitize,” or “destroy” data, there is evidence that it isn’t done consistently across the industry:
- In a Q3 2019 study, Blancco purchased 159 drives from professional sellers using eBay in the U.S., UK, Germany, and Finland. All of the drives were “guaranteed” by the sellers to be cleaned of all data. That wasn’t the case, however: Almost half (42%) still contained data, with 15% of the information being personally-identifying information (PII) and/or corporate data.
- A Q1 2017 NAID study found PII, including credit card data and tax records, on over 44% of 250 hard drives purchased in the secondary market.
This gauntlet of shady, dishonest dealers pushing unpredictable and often unreliable products is what companies face when shopping for working, clean drives. If you are considering the purchase of remarketed drives (or selling your used SATA or SAS drives), make sure you work with a trusted provider who has the necessary credentials and a solid reputation to avoid disappointment.
For your consideration, NextUse provides this information on our process and certifications. Simply put, we specialize in data security and data destruction, with a state of the art lab containing cutting-edge systems and software that enable us to:
- Verify drive integrity
- Repair failed disks using the same equipment and methods as major OEMs
- Overwrite drives with any combination of characters in any sequence
- Verify that the original data is irretrievable
- Degauss or physically destroy drives when resale is not an option
NextUse holds a National Association for Information Destruction (NAID) AAA certification for sanitizing data off numerous hard drive types in our facilities and at client sites. We are certified for all outcomes, including leaving the drives reusable, disabling them from further use, and physically destroying them. At a time when reuse is far more preferable to recycling, we’re ideally positioned to produce top-quality reusable drives.
When dealing with brokers and resellers I’m frequently told that they can source drives cheaper than NextUse. I explain that our costs are slightly higher than the industry average due to our infrastructure investment, our NAID-defined protocols, and the time, power consumption, and manpower needed to achieve our standard: that no drive is resold unless it’s 100% working and wiped clean of data.
Clients keep working with us year after year once they recognize the quality of our product and the positive impact on their:
- Reputation
- Revenue
- Client acquisition and retention
- Market share
Want to explore how we can help you with the purchase and sale of your hard drives? Visit our website at nextuse.us to get started.
About the Author
James Mannering holds the titles of Data Security Specialist/ Enterprise and Consumer Sales at NextUse.
You can contact him directly at 603-601-8293 or [email protected] with any questions.
