From Waste to Resource: How Standardized Health Metrics Can Accelerate the Circular Economy in Storage Media

Current research into hard disk drives (HDD) and solid-state drives (SSD) focuses on predicting failure rates using SMART attributes to decide when to retire a drive and move to the end of life rather than identifying ways to increase product life. This paper looks instead at what attributes need to be present to reuse the drive with full confidence and which attributes have a material impact on reliability during second use. To quantify which attributes had the highest impact we conducted a largescale erasure project of over 117,000 unique drives to identify reasons for the failure of erasure and what drive attributes led to the storage device’s failed sanitization. These findings aim to inform the development of industry standards and practices prioritizing data security, device health and facilitating increased reuse of storage media and furthering the circular economy.