PowerHouse Recycling
Most 45 Drives customers use their Storinators for housing and moving immense amounts of data, whether for cold archival data storage, or for more data-intensive applications such as file serving.
PowerHouse Recycling is using the Storinator for the exact opposite – wiping data off of hard drives.
As North Carolina’s top e-recycler, PowerHouse Recycling services clients from all over the United States and Canada, in many different industries, including government, finance, education, healthcare, data centers, manufacturers and retail. The company provides asset management to electronics recycling (including cellphone recycling) and data center cleanouts.
One key line of PowerHouse Recycling’s business since it started in 2008 has been data destruction – organizations employ the Salisbury-based company to completely wipe data from their hard drives and computers to ensure data security is not compromised. This is completed by hard drive shredding, both on and off site, and by DOD/NIST-grade (Department of Defense/National Institute of Standards and Technology) data wiping in PowerHouse Recycling’s facility.
Before purchasing a Storinator Q30 from 45 Drives, PowerHouse Recycling had a three-tier rack shelf system with several PCs connected to monitors for its data wiping services. Four drives would be connected to each PC.
“My old system did the job, but it wasn’t efficient,” says Mike Kennedy, vice-president of PowerHouse Recycling. “You had to go to each computer and check on the status. It was a lot more time-consuming having to look into 30 different computers that hold four drives each, versus putting 30 hard drives in one box.”
The hardware (and software) PowerHouse Recycling previously used for data wiping also couldn’t accommodate the company’s accelerated growth, meaning the company had to shred a much higher ratio of hard drives versus wipe data in order to keep up with demand.
“With the Storinator, we can now efficiently and securely wipe hard drives in large quantities under DOD/NIST standards, generating more value back to our business while also allowing freeing up valuable time and resources to our technicians for other projects.”
Using a Storinator Q30 allowed PowerHouse Recycling to not only re-gain a great deal of space within its warehouse, but it also greatly increased the company’s efficiency of how many drives could be wiped of their data at one time.
“We are able to run 250GB- 500GB HDDs during the daytime and then fill it with 1TB+ drives to run while everyone is out of the office for the night,” explains Kennedy.
Opting for 45 Drives’ smallest model – weighing 85 pounds when it’s loaded with 30 hard drives – was a deliberate decision.
“The only reason I didn’t go with the 60-drive unit is the weight,” says Kennedy. “Since we are sliding it in and out of the rack so often, I didn’t want the additional stress of the extra 15 or 30 drives.”
While the Storinator Q30 has a starting price of $3,885, other major hard-drive wiping solutions on the market can range anywhere from $40,000 to $80,000. On top of that, some solutions charge a per-drive wipe fee.
“Your system is a quarter of the competitor’s price and does twice the amount of work,” explains Kennedy. “On top of that, it takes up a third of the footprint.”