Devices for the rapid destruction of information on the magnetic carriers.

Immediate and guaranteed destruction of information stored on hard disk drives (HDD) is a topical issue nowadays. One can encounter with such a problem when solving the following problems:

• How to prevent an unauthorized access to the valuable information on HDDs that are not protected from physical access sufficiently?

• How to destroy information on the old or broken down HDDs?

The most difficult problems in the process of designing the devices for fast and guaranteed

destruction of information are device's safety in operation and acceptable price.

At the first glance, such well-known methods of information destruction like computer formatting

or physical destruction of HDD seem to be effective and cheap. But if we look at the results of these

methods more attentively we can see a lot of problems that makes them unacceptable.

Why? Just because these methods:

• Allow to recover the information written on working surface of the magnetic carrier,

even if it were "erased" or'formatted'several times (from 5 to 8, number depends on carrier type);

• Some areas are still workable and information on them still can be recovered even when HDD is destructed physically.

Let us go into detail on the reason of the problems named above. The magnetic recording head creates a kind of "picture" of magnetization on the surface of magnetic carrier that is discerned in the process of reading information on from device. If that information is erased or rewritten then it couldn't be read by the playback head of HDD. But the more detailed analysis of the magnetic surface can recover the 'traces' of previous records. One of the way such an information can be discovered is the Method of Magnetic Field Visualization. This method allows to make the 'picture' on the surface visible with a resolution that's quite enough for bit-by-bit analysis of information. The example of such a visualization is shown in Figure 1. It's the fragment of 'destructed' carrier's working surface (1 - the edge of the surface; 2 - some defects on the surface; 3 - disk format drawing). One can easily guess that this kind of drawings can help to recover information without any difficulties, though it can take some time. This means that the fragments of the 'destructed' HDD should be as small as dust or the number of 'masking' records under the information erased should be very big if you want the information still unrecovered. So we can see that because of problems described above this methods (physical destruction and computer erasing) are too expensive for a widespread use.

But how to solve this problems in other way?

Here's a decision.

The result of our company's many years research became the developing (and patenting) of an effective and high-technology method of guaranteed destruction of information on HDD. The result clearness of magnetic surface is apparent (see Figure 2): there are NO any traces or other evidences of

Magnetic 'picture' left on the working surface of HDD. Besides HDD was neither damaged physically nor dismantled whereas the destruction cycle took several seconds.

There are two types of such a devices we produce now: Utilizers and Information Safes.

Utilizers allows you to destruct information on a big amount of magnetic carriers including broken ones.

The Information Safes are intended for destruction of information 'without delay' that means information can be destructed even when the HDD is in use.

The most popular in product line nowadays are Utilizer devices. Here's the information of one this products.