Kobra SSD (Solid State Devices)

The Kobra SSD is a disintegrator rather than a shredder. Solid state drives, phones, memory chips and circuit boards are fed into a 240 x 25 mm throat and reduced to a sand-like particle that Kobra describes as similar to E-7 under DIN 66399. That distinction matters more with solid state media than with anything else: a conventional drive shredder can leave a NAND package physically intact inside a large fragment, and intact NAND means potentially recoverable data. This machine exists to remove that possibility.

Key Features

• Particle destruction, not fragmentation. Output is a sand-like granulate rather than strips or chips. Kobra rates it as similar to O-7, T-7 and E-7 — the top of the DIN 66399 scales for optical, magnetic and electronic media.
• Designed around solid state failure modes. The threat with an SSD is a surviving memory chip. Reducing the board to particles addresses that directly, which fragment-based destruction does not.
• Very wide media list. Solid state drives and enterprise SSDs, SIM cards, flash drives, circuit boards, cell phones, tablets, USB memory devices, flash memory ICs, CPU chips with internal ROM or flash, and optical discs.
• Up to 90 lb (about 40 kg) per hour. Throughput varies with the screen and the security level selected.
• Screen-based security selection. As with Kobra's other screen machines, particle size and therefore throughput depend on the screen fitted.
• Quiet at idle. 50 dB(A) idle, rising to 60–70 dB(A) under load depending on what is being destroyed.

Specifications

What's in the Box

Machine supplied assembled with the collection container fitted; the screen determines the particle size, so confirm the screen specification on your order acknowledgement. Bags and consumables are not included. Installation requires a 208 V three-phase supply at 50 A per phase and a floor rated for roughly 1,250 lb over a 41 x 32 in footprint.

Who Should Buy This — and Who Should Not

Buy it if you must be able to demonstrate that solid state media has been destroyed to a particle standard rather than merely broken: defence and government contractors, cloud and data-centre operators retiring enterprise SSDs, IT asset disposition providers offering high-assurance destruction as a service, and organisations handling classified or export-controlled data. Kobra states that the Kobra SSD is approved by the NSA and meets the requirements of the NSA/CSS specification for solid state device destruction. Verify the model and configuration against the current NSA/CSS Evaluated Products List before you rely on that for classified work — EPL editions change, and the listing, not the specification alone, is what an auditor will ask to see.

Do not buy it if your media is mostly spinning hard drives. Disintegrating a 3.5 in hard disk is slow and expensive work for a machine of this type, and the Kobra HDD shredder at H-3 destroys platters perfectly adequately at 250 drives an hour for a fraction of the cost. Many organisations run both: the HDD unit for bulk disk retirement and the SSD disintegrator for solid state and for anything that has to meet a high-assurance standard. It is also emphatically not a document shredder — there is no P rating and paper is not on the material list.