Secure Hard Drive Deletion Appliance?

An anonymous reader asks "I am searching for a box into which I can plug a hard drive (IDE or SCSI of various flavors) and automatically begin a secure deletion process (DoD 2250 compliant or the like would be good). This is normally for dead drives which need to be RMA-ed. Because of various regulations (HIPAA for starters), we need to at least attempt to do a good job clearing the disk. I've heard from a number of places, including this Slashdot story, that degaussing isn't great. There are software solutions out there, but in general, I want to toss a replacement hard drive in and not have to hunt around for hardware to put the bad drive in in order to run the software. Given the right case, a solid state drive, some SCSI cards and one of various pieces of software, I can imagine such a beast. Has anyone seen someone selling something like this?" No case-opening is necessary to use a USB/IDE converter, which might be a good middle ground. Any other ideas?

Comments

Re:Data destruction.

[drinkypoo]

HAHA a G4? Running OSX? AFAIK there is no OS on the planet that can handle reading more partition table formats and handle more actual filesystems than Linux. Also, bad hard drives sometimes kill computers, I have had it happen to me personally. It would be best to use the oldest PCI-bus system you have for this particular task, so if you kill it, you aren't sad when you throw it in the bin.

If you TRULY are worried about the sanctity of your data, it should be written to disk only in encrypted form, the key should be stored on a removable device ONLY, and any unencrypted data means you take the platters out of the drives and melt them down to render them utterly unreadable. (Turning it into metal shavings would probably also do.)