[toast0]

> Now why don't these companies keep the drives in-house instead of destroying? That, I don't know.

Keep them and do what with them? If you're an enterprise running many disks, you're generally replacing them with higher capacity disks and the old disks are less useful. Or maybe you have some policy on retiring drives based on age or ssd wear. Or maybe you eliminated a storage tier for whatever reason.

[bluedino]

I worked for a DoD contractor, and we were guilty of sending boxes of SSD's to the shredders. These were in old desktops/laptops.

If we had to replace a drive in a computer (or upgrade it from a HDD to SSD), we had to purchase a new drive. We were not allowed to re-use a drive. However, we could re-issue an entire computer to another user.

Makes zero sense, but that's what the compliance industry came up with. It's a money-making deal for everyone involved, except the companies that need to comply with it.