Which NIST guidance do you follow for wiping drives?

NIST Special Publication 800-88 Revision 2, Guidelines for Media Sanitization, released by NIST in 2025. It replaces Revision 1 from 2014. Tool-level methods point to IEEE 2883, NSA specifications, or an organizationally approved standard.

What is the difference between clear, purge, and destroy?

Clear uses logical overwriting and resists simple recovery. Purge makes recovery infeasible even with lab techniques, for example cryptographic erase or the drive's built-in sanitize command. Destroy renders the media unusable through physical destruction.

Do you provide a certificate?

Yes. Each drive gets a certificate of sanitization listing the device serial number, the method and level used, the date, the technician, and the verification result.

Is NIST certifying your company?

No. NIST publishes guidelines and does not certify vendors. We follow the guidelines and document each job.

Decommissioning // Secure wipe

Secure wipe for retired laptops and desktops.

Before a machine leaves your business, its drive needs a sanitization method that matches how sensitive the data was. We follow NIST SP 800-88 Rev. 2 and document every drive.

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The standard we follow

Updated October 2026

NIST published SP 800-88 Revision 2, Guidelines for Media Sanitization in 2025. It replaces Revision 1 from December 2014. Revision 2 focuses on running a sanitization program and ties tool-level methods to IEEE 2883, NSA specifications, or an approved organizational standard. Cryptographic erase remains the main technique for encrypted media.

NIST does not certify vendors. We follow the guidelines, choose a level for each drive, and keep the record. The full text is at csrc.nist.gov.

Clear, purge, or destroy

Chosen by data sensitivity

Level	What it does	Typical use
Clear	Overwrites data with logical techniques so ordinary recovery tools cannot read it.	Reuse inside your organization, where the next user is trusted.
Purge	Makes recovery infeasible even with lab techniques, for example cryptographic erase or the drive's built-in sanitize command.	Resale, donation, or leaving the company's control, for business data.
Destroy	Physically destroys the media so it cannot be used again.	Drives that held regulated or highly sensitive data, or drives that have failed.

Overwriting alone is not reliable on SSDs, because wear leveling can leave copies in blocks the operating system never addresses. For those drives we use the built-in sanitize command or cryptographic erase.

What we do for each drive

Documented end to end

01 Inventory

Record make, model, serial number, asset tag, and drive type (HDD, SATA SSD, or NVMe). Drive type decides the method.

02 Sanitize

Apply the level you chose: overwrite, cryptographic erase, sanitize command, or physical destruction.

03 Verify

Check the result with the tool's verification log or a read-back test, and record the outcome. A failed check means the drive is not released.

04 Certify

Issue a certificate of sanitization for the batch, with one line per drive: serial, method and level, date, technician, and result.

Scope and limits

What the certificate covers

Pricing is $11 per drive with certificate, or $25 per drive for physical destruction, with a 10% intro discount for local IT support customers on recurring plans (see local IT pricing). Every certificate is backed by our business guarantee. The certificate covers the drives we sanitize. It does not cover data stored outside the machine, such as cloud accounts, email, or backups on other systems. Remove those accounts from each device before it reaches us, and tell us if the machine held regulated data (HIPAA, PCI-DSS, or similar) so we choose the right level.

Sources

Checked October 31, 2026

Retiring a fleet?

Get every drive documented.

Send the device count and what the machines held. We reply with a quote and the level we recommend.

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