Despite the supervillain name, The Destroyinator is a data sanitation device taking aim at e-waste
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It's not picky about which drives it'll have for breakfast either.

So much of data management feels floaty and ephemeral, with just one misplaced click wrecking untold devastation. ‘Click, click, wait…no, no, no! I didn’t mean to delete the entire folder of fanfic!’ So when it comes to intentional data destruction, there’s something compelling about a dedicated device that acts like it really means it.

Enter The Destroyinator from 45Drives. This beefy boy billed as an ‘industrial-grade’ solution to data destruction is capable of wiping up to 60 drives all at once. If you happen to want to blitz an honestly impressive amount of ill-advised, teenaged prose in a hurry, the Destroyinator’s wipe speed can apparently reach up to 64 GB/sec. That means I can rest easy in the knowledge that my first few odes to hardware won’t turn up in a museum some day in the far future.

This data sanitation device supports a wide range of storage devices, including but not limited to NVMe SSDs, 2.5-inch SATA drives, and HDDs with SAS interfaces as well. Once wiped, the drives are even hot-swappable, meaning you don’t need to power the Destroyinator all the way down before loading up another batch of files that will never again see the light of day.

Cutting an imposing silhouette in a 16-gauge industrial steel chassis, it’s a suitable coffin for my very worst writing. Joking aside, the device was designed with more straightforward business purposes in mind and is compatible with both Windows and Linux IT environments.

In a post on X, 45Drives shared, “[It’s] built for e-recyclers, IT pros, and anyone who needs fast, compliant, and profitable drive erasure with zero cost-per-wipe fees. No subscriptions, no tokens, no surprises.”

A recycling plant for tellies and monitors in Norway. A large pile of CRT monitors and screens in various states of disrepair are haphazardly piled on top of eachother. A partially cloudy blue sky can be seen beyond this mountain of e-waste.

(Image credit: Johner Royalty-Free via Getty Images)

45Drives makes the case that though physical destruction of NVMe drives is arguably quicker, making the data inaccessible due to damage rather than deleting the files just creates a heap more e-waste. While e-waste processing has improved over the last few years, sucking gold out of old PC hardware, for instance, is still a fairly labour-intensive process and using what you already have remains the most eco-friendly option. Take the not-so-humble disposable vape—some enterprising creators have repurposed this e-waste scourge to do everything from host a website to powering a home.

Each drive loaded up into the Destroyinator and successfully blitzed is bestowed with an official wipe certificate, indicating the still-intact drive is then ready to enter data storage recirculation. This keeps operational costs down and lessens the overall impact on the environment. Despite the super villain name, The Destroyinator is all about reduce, reuse, recycle.

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