As part of our recent cluster purchase, we traded in 20 old Sun workstations to get a discount on the cluster nodes. However, in order to get rid of the systems, we had to comply with Illinois Public Act 93-0306, which states that all state-owned hard drives must have all data wiped from them before disposal, specifically by overwriting all data with 0s and 1s ten times. This Act applies whether or not any confidential data is stored (or could ever have been stored!) on the drive. At several hours per gigabyte of data, this makes eliminating even the smallest hard drives burdensome.

State Law also prohibits units from destroying equipment that may still be usable, as it is state property. In this case, though, because the systems were traded-in, the hard drives were the property of Sun Microsystems. And Sun generously allowed us to destroy the hard drives, rather than forcing us to hand them over. This let us satisfy the needs of the state government, the University, and Sun itself.

The only remaining issue is to actually destroy the drives.