First it was SCSI, then a few years later RAID, then after that came SAN, quickly followed by NAS and iSCSI. Well at least the "SCSI" part seemed like an old familiar.

It's a shame that all the stuff you learned about the different types of (what we must now call) "parallel SCSI" - LV something or other - no longer adds to a high score in a CV.

Somewhere in the dim distant mists of storage memory (though not necessarily in this order) came SATA, then another comeback for SCSI again, D2d, VTL and the list seems endless.

Now it's ...SSDs, MLC, SLC... and Disk Sanitizers?

Isn't the storage market complicated enough already?

Do you really need to start worrying about something else you've hardly ever heard of?

Before you answer that - here's a much simpler question.

What do you do with your old credit card when the new one arrives? Do you drop it on the street? I don't think so? How about advertising it on eBay? - One old credit card - expiry date nearly over - no longer needed by current owner - going cheap.

How about that new copy of your customer list that the marketing people have been promising you for the last 6 months? When it finally arrives so you can use it at the trade show you're exhibiting at - do you just throw the old one in the trash?

ILM (Information Life cycle Management) became a fashionable term in storage circles about 5 years ago. Like most marketing buzz words - the ILM hype was focused on whatever the vendors were selling at the time. ILM ISVs were mainly selling themselves to bigger storage companies... with a company lifecycle which didn't include much more time than writing a few press releases about the ver 1.0 release before the money from the VC in the wall machines was spent.

But beneath the surface glitter of acronyms there are some useful concepts in the ILM which are still relevant today.

What happens to your data when the storage media they are stored on gets too old?

The afterlife for things like disk drives and RAID systems is not something that most of us think about much. It's not the glamorous end of the storage market.

In the home market maybe your old PCs are stored in the garage. It's a myth that you can give them to the kids. In my experience - the kids always demand and get the newest fastest PCs - much more powerful than the ones that we use at work. Most of your old PCs were probably still working you stopped using them. Maybe that means your old email accounts and bookmarks work too. How long would it take someone to try requesting the main online banks that your password details should be emailed to your old machine? Even if your old PC stopped working and you threw it out - the disk drives can be recycled by environmentally friendly agencies who do deals with your garbage collection company.

In the corporate and government markets - recycling is done wholesale. When new PCs are bought the old ones are traded in or disposed to brokers hundreds or thousands of machines at a time. Someone else is taking care of the problem for you. Or are they?

There's a lot of evidence from security companies like Pointsec that a worryngly high percentage of second hand / refurbished hard disk drives bought on the open market still have readable data.

Yes they were "wiped" clean by commercially available utilities.

Yes the disks were reformated.

But both processes are undoable in a matter of seconds. Many disk wipe utilities are simply that - useful utilities that make it hard for you to see the data on your disk drive. But unless they follow algorithms used by the military, the files they cover up can be easily read by data recovery software.

There are 3 common types of product and service which address the Disk Sanitizer market.

• software - useful for using on one machine or a low number of machines.

• hardware - which wipes a batch of disks clean at hardware speeds - and is useful if you're recycling hundreds of drives.

• services - which mechanically break the disks into fragments which are considered too small for criminals to do anything with. (Although a good data recovery company or your intelligence agency cmay still be able to read files off a 1 inch fragment off a broken disk drive).

The best approach for you to take with maintaining your own data privacy depends on your own situation. But just as you wouldn't throw your old credit card onto the street - think about what's happening to those old disk drives next time you buy a new PC, server or RAID system. And make sure that your broker - if you use one - is using a product which actually works.