When a client asks whether their drives were “wiped to NIST standards,” they’re referring to NIST Special Publication 800-88 — the U.S. government’s guideline for media sanitization and the de facto reference worldwide. Here is what NIST 800-88 actually says, in the plain terms you need when a client or auditor asks.
The three levels of NIST 800-88
Clear — overwrite the media through normal interfaces. Protects against casual recovery with ordinary tools. Appropriate when the media stays inside your organization.
Purge — sanitization that defeats laboratory-grade recovery: firmware-level commands like ATA Secure Erase and NVMe Sanitize, or cryptographic erase on self-encrypting drives. This is the level that matters the moment media leaves your control — which is the entire ITAD business.
Destroy — shred, pulverize, incinerate. Final, but the drive’s resale value goes with it. The economics of refurbishment exist precisely because Purge makes destruction unnecessary for working drives.
Why the media type changes the method
On mechanical drives, overwriting genuinely replaces data, so overwrite-based methods can reach Purge-adjacent assurance. On flash media they cannot: wear leveling and over-provisioned cells mean software overwrites never provably touch every cell. For SSDs and NVMe drives, Purge means the drive’s own firmware sanitization commands — which is why a tool that just “writes zeros” cannot honestly certify Purge on flash, no matter how many passes it runs.
What a sanitization certificate has to show
Under NIST 800-88, a sanitization record worth the name identifies the specific drive (model and serial), the method used, the verification result, when it happened, and who ran it — per drive, not per batch. Parted Magic issues a NIST SP 800-88r2 Purge certificate for every drive, and packages jobs as cryptographically signed evidence packs.
Offline verification is the part clients remember
Some erasure suites store certificates in the vendor’s management portal, which means your client’s proof depends on portal access — and on the vendor’s continued existence. Parted Magic’s evidence packs verify offline: your client checks the signature on their own machine, with no account, no network, and no vendor in the loop. Hand a purchasing manager a proof they can validate themselves and the next contract conversation gets easier.
For live jobs, the PM Report Server streams evidence off the machine while erases run, so records survive even a drive that dies mid-wipe. Licensing is flat — no per-drive fees at any volume; details on the store page, or sales@partedmagic.com for procurement paperwork.