The Aleratec HDD Cruiser is a hard disk drive sanitizer and a hard disk drive duplicator. It can simultaneously sanitize up to 4 hard disk drives with overwrites to every block on the drive or simultaneously make up to 3 copies of a source hard disk drive. This dual purpose product features a powerful stand alone controller that controls both sanitizing and duplicating and a computer is not required which is very important if you intend to sanitize or duplicate any number of hard disk drives. Hard disk drives to be sanitized or duplicated are loaded in key locking, individual, removable, aluminum drive trays. The key lock on each tray is to prevent tampering with any drive during operation and corrupting a sanitizing or duplicating process. In fact the drives cannot be run in the HDD Cruiser without the trays being locked. We use only aluminum drive trays with two cooling fans as the HDD Cruiser controller must access the entire capacity of each drive in both sanitizing and duplicating, so the drives must run for extended periods and cooling is of utmost importance. The HDD Cruiser has a total of 10 ultra quiet cooling fans and the “only from Aleratec” aluminum drive trays offer the best possible thermal conductivity.

Why Sanitize

Data confidentiality has always been an issue with government classified information and with recent laws intended to protect the privacy of individuals health and financial information, it has become a legal concern to most industries. Industry and government are forced to confront the challenge of protecting the confidentiality of classified, corporate, client or patient data. Many industries must now comply with new federal laws mandating rigorous standards for handling, distributing and using confidential client, corporate or patient information or be subject to very serious, even ruinous, penalties. Government agencies have increasingly stringent rules as to the handling of the various levels of classified information. Most industries and government have procedures and equipment to control information storage and exchange protecting individuals identity and personal information (especially in the financial community and health care) and protecting government classified data. Here are some of the regulations aimed at data privacy and protection:

Erasure or destruction of sensitive electronically recorded information from obsolete and excess IT assets can prevent data loss, expensive investigations, embarrassment, and other problematic events. Also, communications with other agencies, corporations, and contractors may also pose security risks. Check to determine if the agency you are with has a policy on suitable data erasure or destruction of media. If there is a policy, it is worthwhile following the expected guidelines. Aleratec recommends for both private as well as public sectors to use Department of Defense standards or total destruction.

Department of Defense Standard DOD 5220.22-M is the National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual (NISPOM) that the DOD, Department of Energy, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and Central Intelligence Agency must use. The DOD 5220.22-M standard is the civilian term given to the terms and policies found in NISPOM. It prescribes methods and standards by which classified data needs to be secured. Regarding digital media, it requires that storage contain no residual data from the previously contained object before being assigned, allocated, or reallocated to another user. Specifically, the DOD 5220.22-M standard requires overwriting with a pattern, then its complement and, finally, with another pattern. This standard requires a minimum of three overwrites.

U.S. Standard, DoD 5220.22-M (E): A standard was developed by the Defense Security Service (DSS) to solve the problem of permanent removal of data. This is also used by many commercial enterprises. Under the National Industrial Security Program (NISP) representatives of the Industrial Security presented their security programs. As a part of these NISP the DSS developed the DoD 5220.22-M standard (National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual - NISPOM), which is used in almost every software deletion tool.

This wipe algorithm uses three write runs: 1. Run: overwrite the data with a defined fixed value
2. Run: overwrite the data with the complement value of the first run
3. Run: overwrite the data with pseudo random values

The regulations of the US Department of Defense refer expressly to the deletion of information on media with the military classification "Secret" or "TOP-Secret" which is not approved with this method. For lower classifications, this method is, sufficient.

U.S. Standard, DoD 5220.22-M (ECE): This method is an extended variant of the DoD 5220.22-M. This variant of the DoD Standard uses for overwriting the data seven runs. Here the data is overwritten two times by using the DoD 5220.22-M (E) standard and one time with random value DoD 5220.22-M (C).

The sequence of the runs is like the following: 1. to 3. run: overwrite the data with the DoD 5220.22-M (E) Standard
4. run: overwrite the data with pseudo random values, the DoD 5220.22-M (C) Standard
5. to 7. run: overwrite the data with the DoD 5220.22-M (E) Standard

There are products and services available designed to increase security, including ways to integrate confidentiality and compliance into daily operations. Most of these products, services and procedures are aimed at the security of stored data and data transmission. However, assuring the confidentiality of classified or private data on desktop and notebook computers when they are to be recycled or disposed of presents an additional challenge and level of exposure that needs to be addressed. Aleratec has developed the HDD Cruiser to help ensure that the data on retired hard drives is not available to others.

Many small businesses and individuals sell their old computers or return them at end of lease with little thought as to the data contained on the hard drive. They simply delete their files before giving up their machines. Users reformat their hard drives, believing, incorrectly, that data is destroyed in the process. The seemly intense drive activity during format is a comprehensive scan for bad sectors. And formatting is really just writing a new root directory, FAT table, boot blocks and a few test sectors.

This is a very significant and often underestimated problem. Considering the continuing growth in sales of new computers, it should be no surprise that the number being de-commissioned is also increasing, and more of these are being recycled than ever before. In fact, more are being recycled than industry analysts had expected. Gartner projects that 160 million PCs will be disposed of worldwide in 2007. Of that 41% will be stored, 32% put in landfills and about 27% recycled. The number actually scrapped is continually reduced due to the evolution of the computer recycling industry and products like the Aleratec HDD Cruiser.

PC technology has advanced to a point where recovering older drives makes financial sense. Gartner projects that for every 10 new hard drives that are sold there are 7 used hard drives resold.

Other than physical destruction, sanitizing a recycled hard drive is the only way to prevent the inadvertent exposure of confidential data to the new owner. You can degauss a hard drive, but the degaussing field required is so strong it physically destroys components in the hard drive and renders it unusable. This is still destruction and probably a good protective measure if your objective is to scrap the drive.

The Aleratec HDD Cruiser accomplishes sanitizing by performing a “data overwrites.” The Aleratec HDD Cruiser sanitizes up to 4 hard disk drives at once with a choice of 3 forms of data overwrites. After the overwrite process hard drives appear the same as new drives to a computer:

1. One pass data overwrite is to write zeroes to every block on the hard drive (0x00 hex). While this will prevent earlier data from being read by the operating system, specialized equipment can extract the original data.

2. The Aleratec Three pass data overwrite derived from DoD 5220.22-M (E) for secure overwriting of hard disk drive writes one pass of zeros (0x00 hex), one pass of 1s (OxFF hex) and one pass of a randomly generated pattern to every block on the hard drive. You have the option to verify the random pattern to provide assurance that the overwrite was completed.

3. The Aleratec Seven pass DoD 5220.22-M is based on the more stringent DoD 5220.22-M (ECE). The Aleratec HDD Cruiser 7 pass writes one pass of each of 0xF6, 0x00, 0xFF, Random, 0x00, 0xFF, and Random again to every block on the hard drive.

Running the overwrite patterns on a hard drive provides more than reasonable assurance that data on all useable blocks will be unrecoverable.

Since it can sanitize 4 hard disk drives at once, the Aleratec HDD Cruiser makes the task of sanitizing a number of drives much more manageable. Even in smaller organizations, the number of hard drives that need to be cleansed can be daunting without the HDD Cruiser. With the relatively low cost of the Aleratec HDD Cruiser an organization can justify buying more than one system to meet the task.

It is inherent in government security to be continually aware of the perils of sensitive information falling into the wrong hands. Companies also need to recognize the significant risk associated with breaches of private information. When companies don’t properly sanitize retired hard drives, they expose themselves to serious public relations, legal and business repercussions. Data confidentiality is protected by federal statutes that impose extensive rules, requirements, and devastating penalties for noncompliance. To prevent security breaches, retired hard drives must either be destroyed or comprehensively overwritten by sophisticated sanitizing methods like those implemented in the Aleratec HDD Cruiser.

Duplicating

When a company installs new or recycled computers or hard disk drives, new operating systems and software need to be installed at the same time in many cases. Attaching each hard drive to a computer for formatting, loading new operating systems, software and data for a number of systems is unmanageable for most organizations. The HDD Cruiser with its 1:3 hard disk duplicating feature is designed for making this situation manageable.

The HDD Cruiser makes up to 3 identical duplicates of any source hard drive it sees. We just covered sanitizing, the HDD Cruiser is the most logical way to put recycled drives back in business.

The HDD Cruiser will copy the source drive exactly. For example, if the source drive is formatted 80GB and the target drives are 120GB, the HDD Cruiser will format the 120GB drives to 80GB. Drive capacities can be mixed, except the targets must be the at least the same size as the source drive.

Copying hard disks is really easy. The HDD Cruiser default start up screen is Copy HD. Just load your source disc and up to 3 targets and push ENT. The copy process starts and the display shows time remaining to complete.

For the sophisticated user the stand alone controller has many features for controlling the duplicating or sanitizing process. The first level menu choices are as follows:

1. Copy HD
2. Compare HD
3. PreScan HD
4. ReScan Bus
5. Source HD Size
6. Overwrite
7. Setup