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Comment by someweirdperson | Hacker News Reader

Lenovo offers a "keep your drive" warranty option. I thought this upgrade option was needed to keep the drive when something (drive or other) fails, but maybe it is only relevant in case a drive fails and is replaced under warranty?

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"keep your drive" option is for people that need to physically shred their drives when they fail. Many financial organizations utilize this policy and document it in their SOC1/SOC2 controls and sometimes in their customer contracts. I was in a cloud provider that did this with over 50k servers.

I’ve seen one of these shredders in action. You can just throw in a handful of full 3.5 inch drives and they just fucking vanish.

Indeed. In our case mobile shredding services would pull up to our datacenters around the world and DC Operations would bring them out on a cart. They scan the serial numbers and then same deal, into the machine, out as tiny specs of metal.

Ever do a whole chicken or pig? You know, for science?

There wouldn’t be much science. It would definitely just vanish.

That's an upgrade option now? It used to be standard, I think even suggested that you remove your drive before sending in your thinkpad. Granted, the last time I had to do that was 2009 or so.

It sometimes is included in the warranty depending on how you buy it

I know when we were RMAing drives as a company there was an $8 option to not return the drive. As it was free shipping to return it we’d just send it back - no sensitive data.

If you really need to be secure you encrypt AND shred. But you have to encrypt before it fails of course.

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