Q. Our company is wanting to get into the service business of purging sensitive data off of disk drives, to government standards.
Many of the software disk purge solutions we are considering will have us pay them a fee for each disk that we purge. We hope to eventually be purging thousands of drives so we see that this per-drive-purge charge could amount to a LOT of money. I can’t find any information on your web site showing how much STB charges me to purge drives – can you help me find this information?
A. Our per-drive purge price is not found anywhere on our web site because we do not charge per disk purge.
In other words, our “extra” charge for you using the STB Suite to purge drives is zero dollars per drive.
Zilch, nada, nothing.
As an example, if you purge 10 drives a month, you would owe us an extra $0 that month. Or if you purge 1,000 in a month, your add-on charge that month would be $0 too. The formula is easy. It isn’t graded by volume, there is no discount available – it’s just always “no extra charge”. Keep that money for yourself – do something fun with it – enjoy!
Disk purging used to actually require the purge method to be tested and approved/accepted by a government agency. If you wanted to have a product to purge disks you had to find a government agency to “sponsor” you and work with you in conjunction with (at the time) the Defense Investigative Service (DIS) to grant you an official approval.
All of which we did with our DataScrubber product. Way back in the dark ages of computing – around 1993 or so. All of that work to get approval…it took about a year of solid testing and proving to earn it. Memories fade in our quickly changing marketplace, but I seem to remember that at the time there was one other company which actually completed that same process. It was a lot of work!
These days all product-explicit (disk purge) testing and approving is done away with. The specifications for a purge operation are just published and companies providing purge solutions are supposed to just conform to that specification.
One thing that means is that pretty much without exception there is NO difference in the way ANY purge software on the market actually works to accomplish the purge. They all do the same thing, and the facts are the disk manufacturers are actually making this process easier and easier with the new SAS and SATA command specifications.
So, do we not charge per purge because our purge is somehow inferior?
In a word, “No!”.
In the 1990’s we knew enough about disk purging that we were able to earn our endorsement, working with the Air Force and DIS. Believe me, we haven’t forgotten how to purge disks! I don’t remember any of today s disk purge companies being around back then…If so it would be fun to compare notes about what getting that approval was like.
We were there then. We’re here today. Then it was MUCH harder to do the purge, and it was certainly much harder to provide purge software when than approval was required…
So here’s a few other purge questions and answers for you to consider:
- Do our various disk purge techniques conform to government standards? – Yes
- How many drives per system can STB Suite Purge? – Hundreds at a time. At full disk speed.
- Can STB Suite Purge print a certificate detailing the purge process for each drive? – Yes
- Is there any other audit trail created by STB Suite Purge? – Yes, three separate records and databases record everything on a per-drive basis in addition to the certificate for your customer.
- Is the STB Suite Purge function being maintained? – Yes. All of the latest T10 & T13 purge technique proposals are already integrated (Sanitize, Crypto, SAS, SATA). Many new features in recent STB Suite releases have had to do with disk purging.
- Does the STB Suite Purge functionality quit working if I don’t do annual maintenance? – No. Without annual maintenance you will miss getting new features, access to technical support and such, but you will always be able to run the version of STB Suite which you last had covered. Including Disk Purge with NO Per-Purge charges.
- Can we customize the purge – number of passes, data patterns, how is the purge verified, etc? – Yes to all of that. We are even happy to help you configure your purge setup for getting the maximum number of drives purged per month.
Summary
You will want to maximize the number of drives you can purge per day/week/month/year ASAP.
We want to help you do that, like we’ve been helping companies do for the past 24 years.
After all, it will cost you the same to purge 5,000 drives in a month as to do 1 – it will cost you nothing more!