READ

Revolutionising computer hardware disposal

When you’re dealing with top secret data, you can’t just throw old hard drives in the bin. An Australian invention that eats them like lollies promises to deal with this problem.
Revolutionising computer hardware disposal
Image credit: Aeontech

Computers are everywhere in our world today. Everyone has one, every business uses them. But have you ever wondered what happens to old computers?

Chances are, they end up in landfill, if you’re feeling irresponsible.

Or they are disposed of by a specialist company, if you want to do the right thing.

Sometimes though, you can’t just chuck them away. If they contain sensitive data, you need to make sure it can’t fall into the wrong hands. And that’s when you might need The Machine.

Super destruction for super security

Banks, defence departments, corporate R&D divisions—these places and more operate at the highest levels of data security. Firewalls, encryption— they use all the hardware and software tricks to protect their data from those who would steal it. But protecting your data once the hardware it’s stored on is obsolete is another matter entirely.

Traditionally, physical destruction is the best way. Smash it with a hammer, melt it into slag or put it in a blender.

Blending an iPhone like a smoothie

Video credit: Blendtec
Blending an iPhone like a smoothie

The problem is these methods aren’t 100%—and 100% is what you need for highly important data.

A dedicated hacker can piece together a hard drive from smashed shards.

It’s expensive and environmentally destructive to melt components down.

We don’t all own a Blendtec blender.

Plus these methods are generally time consuming and impractical.

Enter The Machine

A team of Aussie engineers looked at this problem and have recently released a solution that will take the hardware destruction world by storm. Their answer? The Machine—a mobile device that takes hard drives in one end and produces pulverised chips at the other.

Wrapped in secrecy, The Machine uses a top secret series of internal systems to deal with hard drives the way Mariah Carey deals with hot tea. Total destruction.

View Larger

The Machine can turn the contents of this warehouse…

Image credit: Aeontech
View Larger

… into a pile of pulverised chips

Image credit: Aeontech

And it does it quickly, relatively quietly and inexpensively. The Machine can deal with thousands of hard drives in a matter of weeks, rather than the years other methods might take. A big, opaque box with a hopper on top and chute below, once a drive is dropped inside, the remains are spat out in a matter of minutes.

“This is a total game changer,” says Shan Patterson, CEO of Perth IT hardware disposal firm Aeontech.

“All around the world, millions of dollars are spent every year on disposing of secure hardware.

“With the huge cost to the environment and business of traditional methods, The Machine will utterly change the way we deal with high-security data assets because people will no longer need to use expensive and time-consuming traditional methods.”

While the most incriminating thing on your hard drive is probably your browser history full of goats yelling like humans, data security is a big risk for many organisations. With the advent of The Machine, the world just got a whole lot safer for them.

David Satterthwaite
About the author
David Satterthwaite
David manages his own communications and marketing company, with a focus on the innovation sector. He has worked as a CSIRO Marketing and Communications Manager, responsible for the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. He enjoys writing for Particle as a way of supporting WA's science community.
View articles
David manages his own communications and marketing company, with a focus on the innovation sector. He has worked as a CSIRO Marketing and Communications Manager, responsible for the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. He enjoys writing for Particle as a way of supporting WA's science community.
View articles

NEXT ARTICLE

We've got chemistry, let's take it to the next level!

Get the latest WA science news delivered to your inbox, every fortnight.

Republish

Creative Commons Logo

Republishing our content

We want our stories to be shared and seen by as many people as possible.

Therefore, unless it says otherwise, copyright on the stories on Particle belongs to Scitech and they are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

This allows you to republish our articles online or in print for free. You just need to credit us and link to us, and you can’t edit our material or sell it separately.

Using the ‘republish’ button on our website is the easiest way to meet our guidelines.

Guidelines

You cannot edit the article.

When republishing, you have to credit our authors, ideally in the byline. You have to credit Particle with a link back to the original publication on Particle.

If you’re republishing online, you must use our pageview counter, link to us and include links from our story. Our page view counter is a small pixel-ping (invisible to the eye) that allows us to know when our content is republished. It’s a condition of our guidelines that you include our counter. If you use the ‘republish’ then you’ll capture our page counter.

If you’re republishing in print, please email us to let us so we know about it (we get very proud to see our work republished) and you must include the Particle logo next to the credits. Download logo here.

If you wish to republish all our stories, please contact us directly to discuss this opportunity.

Images

Most of the images used on Particle are copyright of the photographer who made them.

It is your responsibility to confirm that you’re licensed to republish images in our articles.

Video

All Particle videos can be accessed through YouTube under the Standard YouTube Licence.

The Standard YouTube licence

  1. This licence is ‘All Rights Reserved’, granting provisions for YouTube to display the content, and YouTube’s visitors to stream the content. This means that the content may be streamed from YouTube but specifically forbids downloading, adaptation, and redistribution, except where otherwise licensed. When uploading your content to YouTube it will automatically use the Standard YouTube licence. You can check this by clicking on Advanced Settings and looking at the dropdown box ‘License and rights ownership’.
  2. When a user is uploading a video he has license options that he can choose from. The first option is “standard YouTube License” which means that you grant the broadcasting rights to YouTube. This essentially means that your video can only be accessed from YouTube for watching purpose and cannot be reproduced or distributed in any other form without your consent.

Contact

For more information about using our content, email us: particle@scitech.org.au

Copy this HTML into your CMS
Press Ctrl+C to copy