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A Blancco Erasure Happens Every Second. Hard Drive Shredding Can’t Keep Up

On average, Blancco performs a data erasure every second. Each one represents an organization choosing to protect its data, keep a usable drive in circulation, and prove it was done. Now consider the alternative: in the time it takes a powerful industrial shredder to destroy a single drive, six drives have been erased and put back to work.

Physical destruction still feels like a safe choice for many IT teams. But it can leave security gaps, and it carries a real cost in time, value, and sustainability. The gap isn’t the shredding itself. It’s the wait before it and the chain of custody around it. We first touched on these figures in our on-demand webinar, The Boardroom Case for Circular IT, and they are worth revisiting now that we can confirm the scale Blancco solutions are capable of.

Stephanie Larochelle Stephanie Larochelle is Content Marketing Manager at Blancco, where she covers secure data erasure and IT asset lifecycle management for corporate IT teams, ITAD providers and mobile device processors. She brings more than a decade of technical writing experience and a background in military service, information security and cybersecurity that informs her approach to data protection and regulatory compliance.

A second of hard drive shredding in perspective

The estimate of one erasure every second describes the average volume over a one-year period across all Blancco customers. Individual erasure times vary by drive type and capacity, and Blancco software can erase hundreds of devices simultaneously. For comparison, an industrial shredder rated at about 600 drives an hour processes roughly one drive every six seconds.

In the time it takes to destroy a single drive, about six erasures are complete. Scale that up and the gap widens quickly. A shredder working at full speed destroys about 10 drives a minute and 600 an hour. At the same pace, Blancco software completes about 60 erasures a minute and 3,600 an hour, which adds up to about 86,400 a day.

Hard drive shredding vs. Blancco Certify: a shredder handles 600 drives per hour, while Blancco erases 3,600 devices per hour.

Over a full year, that is about 31.5 million devices. To destroy that many drives, you would need roughly six industrial shredders running around the clock, without a break, a jam, or a day of maintenance.

But there are bigger concerns beyond the sheer volume and scalability of hard drive shredding versus secure data destruction. Choosing to shred first creates costs beyond time.

Where drive destruction leaves you exposed

A corporate IT team or ITAD provider may have hundreds or thousands of drives waiting to be processed. As we have seen, a shredder can only handle so many drives an hour, so many of them have to wait. They sit in storage, in the rack, or in an overstuffed closet or empty office, waiting to be decommissioned. And an idle drive that still holds data is an asset that puts the organization at risk and exposes sensitive consumer data.

In early 2025, a data leak in the Netherlands showed the cost of improper disposal. A hobbyist who repairs computers bought five 500 GB hard drives for five euros each at a flea market in Belgium. At home, he found medical data from 2011 to 2019, including prescriptions, addresses, dates of birth, and national ID numbers for hundreds of people. He reported the discovery to the Dutch Data Protection Authority and bought the seller’s remaining ten drives. The data traced back to a Dutch healthcare software company that no longer exists, which left no clear party to hold responsible.

A costlier example comes from the financial industry. It cost one of the best-known names in global finance more than $155 million. The firm hired a moving company with no experience in data destruction to decommission thousands of hard drives and servers, then failed to monitor its work. Some of the equipment was sold at online auction with customer data still on it, and the firm learned of the problem only when a downstream buyer called. The fallout included a $35 million settlement with the SEC and a $6.5 million multistate settlement in 2023, along with a loss of customer trust that is impossible to measure.

Physical destruction cannot always be avoided, because some drives are simply beyond use. But the recommended practice is to securely erase the data while the drive is still in the rack. Erase first, and an idle drive is no longer a liability. If a drive does have to be shredded later, there is nothing left to leak.

Preserving proof while managing time

The gap between one second and six does not end at the shredder. Destruction carries a second time cost that rarely makes it onto the spreadsheet: proving it happened. Every shredded drive still has to be tracked from the rack to the shredder, matched to a serial number, and documented. When something goes wrong, rebuilding that trail after the fact could be slow, manual, and hard to defend.

Some data destruction standards raise the bar even further. NSA/CSS Policy Manual 9-12, for example, lists disintegration into particles nominally 2 millimeters on an edge as an approved way to destroy a hard drive, and it calls for the same particle size for solid-state media. NIST SP 800-88 recognizes destruction as one sanitization method but leaves particle-size specifics to standards like this one. Meeting a requirement like that takes time, and it still leaves you needing proof that it was done to the letter.

Erasure builds the proof into the process. Every erasure Blancco Certify performed over the past year also produced a digitally signed, tamper-proof certificate for that drive (or device) at the moment the data was sanitized and verified.

Erasing first changes the order of operations. The data is verifiably gone while the drive is still on the network, so by the time a drive reaches a shredder or an ITAD, you can prove its final disposition is secure, whatever happens to it next.

The 2026 State of Data Sanitization Report shows why that proof matters. Ninety-four percent of organizations said they were at least moderately confident their practices leave drives and devices free of data before disposal, yet 38% had suffered a data leak in the past twelve months, and 32% of those that did traced it to redeployed drives or devices retaining sensitive data.

Many organizations still rely on methods that do not verify the data was destroyed. And with AI driving hardware refreshes (99% of the organizations that deployed AI in the past year destroyed at least some drives or devices as a result), the number of drives waiting on a shredder is only growing.

Erasure scales to any volume of drive decommissioning and reduces reliance on hard drive shredding. Physical destruction remains necessary for some drives, such as those that are failed or damaged, but wherever a drive still functions, erasure should come first.

Choose proof over guesswork in drive decommissioning

See how Blancco Certify delivers verified erasure and diagnostics in one audit trail and make erasure the first step for every drive you retire.

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