One of the more novel products exhibited at this year's CeBIT show was a hard drive shredder.

The offering from Neumann AG makes sure that data from discarded hard drives is never recoverable by literally shredding the device into small pieces.

Irretrievably deleting data from a hard disk is easier said than done. True professionals can retrieve information from almost any data carrier, even damaged ones.

Traditional methods of securely wiping drives, either by writing over the entire drive with a series of ones or zeros, or by destroying the partition table, can be ineffective and time consuming.

This ultimate destroyer is similar to a shredder for garden cuttings. The 'hard disk crasher' can completely destroy up to 15 hard disks or 60 magnetic tapes per minute.

Users simply insert the drive into a small slot and the hard disk crasher chops them up into tiny bits. Not even the world's most capable IT pro can put the data together again.