Expert's Expert: How IBM erases top secret data from a hard drive

Hint: It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "drilling down."

IBM's Global Asset Recovery Services (GARS) facility in Mainz, Germany specializes in "reverse logistics."

Long story short: Instead of making computers, the factory breaks them down into components or refurbishes them to be resold.

Some companies don't want their machines resold, so IBM dismantles them instead.

When companies are absolutely adament about data security, wrote Stephen Pritchard in the September 20 Financial Times, GARS removes the hard drives from their computers and dispatches them to "a group of workers stationed along a workbench equipped with electric drills. These workers... drill a strategically positioned hole through them. This, management stresses, renders the drive useless and makes it impossible to recover data."

Seems a heckuva lot quicker and more secure than the usual palaver about "wiping" a hard drive, where somehow even though it's been erased, specialized companies are still able to recover "unrecoverable" data.