Data center decommissioning and drive destruction at scale
A colocation floor or hyperscale hall retires drives by the pallet, on a migration schedule that does not wait for a recycler's pickup calendar. One trailer processes about 4,000 drives a day at your dock, and central Ohio's data center corridor is an hour from ours.
What the rules require
- NIST SP 800-88 Rev. 2Destroy for media leaving your control, documented per device. At data center scale the documentation is the hard part, and it is what we deliver.
- Customer contracts and SOC 2Tenants' contracts and your own SOC 2 controls specify media disposal. A serial-level certificate per decommission is the evidence your auditors and your tenants both accept.
- Hyperscale and government tenantsCleared and CUI workloads bring NSA/CSS 9-12 and NIST 800-171 into the same building. We destroy to the tenant's standard on the same visit.
How we handle it
We plan from your rack list: drive counts and types per rack, the standard per tenant, and your cutover windows. Drives are pulled with your staff, serial-captured against the host, degaussed and shredded or disintegrated, and staged nowhere.
Chassis, rails, switches, and PDUs go to reuse or scrap with the drives already gone. A box truck with a lift gate handles the e-scrap on larger jobs, and boards go to a domestic smelter through R2-certified partners.
For a floor larger than a day, we stage over consecutive days, and the semi now in fabrication is built for exactly this work.
“If they can fit you into their schedule, take it! They quickly destroyed thousands of our old hard drives for us and provided documentation, so we could adhere to our local laws. We’ll be using again soon!”
On the floor
- Badging and escorts. We send crew names ahead for badging, follow your escort policy on the floor, and pull drives with your staff at the rack.
- Dock, not floor. The machines are on the truck, so destruction happens at your dock or lot inside your perimeter; drives travel from the rack to the truck under your escort and ours, logged at both ends. If your policy requires that no intact drive leave the data hall, tell us at quote time and we will plan the procedure with you before we book.
- Weight tickets. E-scrap removed by the box truck leaves with weight tickets from our recycling partner, so your sustainability reporting has pounds, not estimates.
- Contracts. Our insurance program is on the trust page; if your MSA requires limits above it, tell us early and we will address it with our broker before the job.
Where we do it
Columbus, Newark and Heath, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Washington, and everywhere else we go.
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Questions from data centers and colocation
How many drives can you do in a day?
About 4,000 per trailer. A larger floor is staged over consecutive days, and larger capacity is on the way with the semi.
Can you match serials to hosts?
Yes. We capture the drive serial against the chassis or host serial at the rack, so the certificate reconciles to your CMDB.
Do you take the racks and rails?
Yes. A box truck with a lift gate removes the chassis and e-scrap once the drives are destroyed, and the recycling documentation follows.
What about tenants with classified workloads?
Their media is destroyed to NSA/CSS 9-12 on listed equipment under their security officer's conditions, on the same visit.
Do you provide weight tickets for the e-scrap?
Yes. Chassis, rails, and other e-scrap removed by the box truck are weighed by our recycling partner and the tickets come with the recycling documentation.