How a leading personal computing company turned monthly waste into millions and why most data centers still pay to destroy what they could recover
In 2017, a major OEM was paying $350,000 a month to destroy used storage devices. Most worked perfectly, but because they had once held customer data, they were marked for destruction. Drives came back by the tens of thousands and were shredded. Every one of them.
Not unusual. Just standard operating procedure. But here’s what rarely gets said: the cost of destruction is more than money. Every month, they were scrapping functional hardware, burning energy to destroy it, and fueling the e-waste problem (in the name of being careful).
Then someone finally asked the obvious question: is shredding drives the only option?
Soon after, they found a strategic partner who specialized in making things… reconnect with value. Turns out, they could wipe data to NIST 800-88 standards and remove every trace of the drive’s identity. Serial numbers gone. Labels stripped. No brand, no fingerprint, nothing traceable. What remained was a clean, anonymous drive ready for resale, redeployment, or return to the supply chain.
Six months later, that waste stream had become a revenue stream. The $350K destruction cost was gone. In its place: $25 million a year in recovered value. Ninety-five percent of incoming drives were now being recovered.
They didn’t overhaul their infrastructure. They didn’t bet on unproven tech. Together with their strategic partner, ahem, they questioned the industry’s default assumption that security and sustainability can’t coexist. And it worked.
So… if recovery is fast, profitable, secure, and ESG-positive – why haven’t others followed?
Why companies still choose destruction
So if this recovery model works, why haven’t others adopted it? Because destruction has been the only way to guarantee zero risk. Until now.
Data breaches cost companies an average of $4.45 million and take 204 days to identify plus another 70 to contain. Ransomware has topped threat assessments for seven straight years. Large tech companies stay conservative by necessity and even suggesting that sensitive equipment leave company walls sets off alarms. (Literally.)
“If something goes wrong and someone finds out you reused a drive that once held sensitive data… you’re done. Your career’s over. It’s hard to take that risk over a few million bucks.”
— KM Lee, Global Engineering Lead, Reconext
As brutal as that math is, it checks out. These are global giants with everything to lose. That scale changes how risk gets evaluated. Pressure builds to minimize variables, especially when third-party involvement triggers extra compliance review. Even well-designed recovery programs get blocked if they require external trust.
One hyperscaler we spoke with evaluated a white-labeled recovery solution that could have generated $248 million annually. The technology worked. The security protocols passed review. But implementation stalled on a fundamental question: How does this advance our core mission?
When your business model focuses on rapid expansion and breakthrough innovation, even substantial cost savings can feel incremental compared to the strategic initiatives that define success. For companies spending billions on AI infrastructure and global expansion, a $248 million recovery program simply doesn’t rank high enough on the strategic priority list.
And even when executives see the financial upside, they encounter what one veteran called “thorough due diligence from every stakeholder.” Security teams focus on breach prevention. Legal teams hunt for exposure. Procurement evaluates vendor risk. Each department is optimizing for their primary responsibility, which is exactly what they should do.
Implementation requires coordination across multiple teams, comprehensive documentation, and approval cycles that ensure nothing gets overlooked. These safeguards exist for good reason. But they can create timing challenges where decisions take longer than technology refresh cycles.
What most companies miss is that recovery has evolved beyond a risky, unproven experiment.
What the OEM saw (and others still don’t)
Recovery doesn’t require bravery anymore. It requires process. The risks didn’t vanish. But the system matured. The tools got better. The people specialized. The outcomes became repeatable.
Data center recovery has matured industry wide. What once seemed risky is now routine, complete with standardized safeguards, full traceability, and deployment models that keep companies in control.
Different organizations have different risk tolerances, and our recovery approach is designed to meet all of them: full off-site processing with chain-of-custody tracking, box-in-box on-site processing with direct customer oversight, or complete in-facility processing where nothing leaves the premises. Portable systems can be deployed entirely within an active data center.
That OEM didn’t place a risky bet. We helped them build every safeguard directly into their existing compliance framework. No exceptions. No shortcuts.
The result? Repeatable processes around anonymization, certified erasure, and GPS-tracked custody. Security became the default. A compliance risk became a recoverable asset stream, at scale and under scrutiny. (We’ll touch on how this works in a moment.)
But before that could happen, we had to solve the one problem that kept everyone else on the sidelines: traceability.
The traceability trap
Our team figured out something important: If you can’t trace where a device came from, why should it be a compliance issue?
Traditional data erasure removes information, but it leaves the device’s identity intact. Serial numbers, part numbers, and manufacturer labels are all still visible, creating a clear path back to the original owner. That traceability made security teams nervous about any recovery program. Understandably.
The solution was what we call “forensic arrays,” a process that completely removes every identifying marker. Serial numbers eliminated, part numbers stripped, all labeling removed. Ian Lovell, Vice President VPS Inbound at Reconext, describes it as “removing the fingerprint so forensically you can’t trace where it came from.”
This white labeling transforms enterprise storage devices into truly generic components. No data. No traceability. No compliance issue.
But even with forensic arrays, trust was still a barrier. How does a $500 billion company trust a partner’s claim that data erasure is complete?
KM Lee explains the solution:
“You give us your data recovery agency, and we work with them to do all the accreditation.”
Every major organization already has in-house forensic teams – experts who retrieve data from damaged or corrupted drives, support litigation, and handle breaches.
We work directly with those internal teams. They validate the erasure themselves. If their own experts confirm that the data is unrecoverable, the trust issue disappears.
“If your own recovery agency says that you are clean, then we can trust that you are clean, right?” KM notes. The customer never has to trust our claims. We exceed their own security standards using their existing infrastructure.
Physical custody follows the same logic: GPS tracking, real-time alerts, end-to-end documentation, remote shutdown capability. Every stage is accounted for.
With security solved, the only question left was technical complexity.
Engineering recovery into the process
Most recovery tools process one drive at a time. Proteus doesn’t.
It’s a portable testing platform engineered for asynchronous, high-volume operation. It supports any brand, make, model, or interface. More than 400 units are now active across our facilities and customer sites.
Power and data pathways are independently managed, allowing drives with completed tests to exit while others continue processing. Failed drives trigger alerts. New drives enter without disrupting the flow.
What makes Proteus especially valuable is its adaptability. Custom configurations can be developed in as little as six weeks to handle unfamiliar hardware. During a deployment in Germany, our team encountered NVIDIA-branded servers they’d never seen before. The drives were extracted and processed on-site using portable Proteus testers. No delay.
But Proteus is just one tool in the recovery toolkit. For full data center decommissioning, we deploy Rackwipe that works at server level rather than individual drives. While Proteus handles extracted storage components through 32 or 64-slot testing stations, Rackwipe takes control of entire server racks through their existing network infrastructure.
Unlike traditional solutions like Blancco, which require someone to walk around with a USB drive and wipe servers one by one, Rackwipe can simultaneously process hundreds of servers by connecting through switches and using network boot capabilities. During one deployment, a single operator wiped nearly 1,000 servers at once. The system also handles networking equipment, erasing IP addresses from switches, generating complete inventory reports of CPU specs and memory configurations, and managing the full decommissioning process.
Both systems can work in tandem: Rackwipe for the primary server-level processing, with Proteus as backup for drives that can’t be accessed through the network approach.
But here’s what makes this more than just efficient processing: every device that flows through these systems generates intelligence that destruction destroys forever.
Engineering recovery into the process
Recovery generates business intelligence you can’t get through shredding. Every failed device tells a story about supplier quality, usage patterns, and performance data. Destruction erases all of it.
A Fortune 100 technology company discovered that third-party erasure methods they’d trusted were incomplete, a blind spot they only found through our analytics. Predictive models now help identify when to replace components and flag quality issues that influence purchasing decisions worth millions.
Their rare earth magnet recovery program, launched during the original 2019 pilot, shows how recovery data turns into real outcomes. That initiative led to 25,000 Seagate drives with recycled magnets being shipped in their laptops. It marked the beginning of a closed-loop supply chain that reduced mining reliance and helped solidify their sustainability positioning.
But the real value amplification happens when components cross industries. Storage devices become inputs for automotive manufacturing, aerospace systems, and clean energy infrastructure.
At this point, the question isn’t whether it works. It’s how fast companies are willing to act.
This is not a tech problem anymore
A multinational PC manufacturer’s success raises an obvious question: if this model delivers financial and environmental results while meeting security standards, why hasn’t it become the norm?
The answer has less to do with technology and more to do with internal dynamics. Compliance friction and career risk calculations slow down even the most clear-cut decisions.
We’ve seen what’s possible. $350,000 per month in destruction costs became $25 million per year in recovered value. The technology exists. The safeguards are proven. The implementation models are already in use.
The gold mine is in your data center. Start recovering or keep shredding.
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If you’re ready to explore what recovery could look like inside your environment, securely and on your terms,
let’s talk.
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