Our mobile data destruction equipment is outfitted with NSA evaluated degaussing equipment. This patented equipment has been evaluated and listed by the NSA as acceptable for the destruction of classified hard drives and tapes. For customers requiring destruction of classified materials, degaussing hard drives then shredding them is the only NSA evaluated process. Data Destroyers’ CAGE code is available upon request.

We offer degaussing services on-site at your facility, or off-site at one of our controlled and monitored data centers. Our unique and proprietary process, along with our highly trained and screened personnel, provides the highest level of security for tape disposal.

Data is stored in magnetic media, such as tapes and hard drives, by making very small areas called magnetic domains change their magnetic alignment to be in the direction of an applied magnetic field. This phenomenon occurs in much the same way a compass needle points in the direction of the earth’s magnetic field.

Degaussing, commonly called erasure, leaves the domains in random patterns with no preference to orientation, thereby rendering previous data unrecoverable. Hard drives cannot be re-used after degaussing although some tapes can be re-used after the degaussing process.

Degaussing “Fun” Fact

Named after Carl Friedrich Gauss (the creator of the Gauss unit of magnetism), degaussing is the process of decreasing or eliminating a remnant magnetic field. Due to magnetic hysteresis, it is generally not possible to reduce a magnetic field completely to zero, so degaussing typically induces a very small “known” field referred to as bias. According to Wikipedia, degaussing was originally applied to reduce ships’ magnetic signatures during WWII. Degaussing is also used to reduce magnetic fields in CRT monitors and to destroy the data on magnetic media.