<< My question if anyone has a similar process and/or experience - should the hard drives be reformatted/overwritten prior to the onsite destruction process?  >>

My suggestion would be to forget about reformatting or wiping the drives before having them destroyed.  If your vendor is using a drive crusher that meets the variety of standards for disposal, there is no need to delete anything before the destruction process.  The platters in the drive are stretched and mangled to the point that no data will ever be retrieved.  

Please note that drive shredder software is extremely slow.  Think about how long it takes to copy 500 GB or 1 TB of content to the drive today, now multiply that by the number of passes you intend to use in you overwrite process.  It can take days.  A simple reformat akin to asking someone not to look.  

We had enough volume of obsolete hard drives and mobile devices to warrant purchase of a PD-5 hard drive crusher.  It allows us to several hundred standard hard drives an hour.  We purchased a model which allows destruction of both traditional and solid state drives.  I has been a very worth while investment.

Bill Roach, CRM

Opinions are my own and not those of my employer or any other individual or entity.

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