I have bought and used many shredders over the past 10 years between personal and business use. I have learned a few things (the hard way) so now I apply what I have learned to all shredders. They all over heat if you use them continuously, so with any shredder use it here and there and never constantly. I know this can be difficult when you have stacks to shred, but do yourself a favor and just shred a small amount several times throughout the day. Whatever the sheet max is, divide by two. Also annoying, I know, but it's easier on the shredder and you decrease chances that you'll get a paper jam.
So, now about this shredder. I have had it for a several days now and so far I love it. My basic qualifications were cross cut and shredding CDs/DVDs. I did hours of research and decided on this one because of the generally good reviews. It was also the only model that shredded CDs/DVDs that was at a price that I felt was reasonable. The fact that it is mircocut is a bonus. It works very well. The first day I shredded 15 CDs and it worked with ease. Since then I have been working on a 2 inch stack of papers. I shred 4-5 pages at a time for a minute or less continuously. It doesn't feel hot or seem to strain at all. The only con I can see at this point is how you feed the paper. Its feeds in at an angle, to prevent fingers, ties, hair, etc from getting caught. I see the point, but it takes me and extra second or two to get the paper in, which gets annoying.
Overall, if you want a good shredder for mircocut and CDs/DVDs and you don't shred too much this is a good choice.
1/2/14 Update - I've had this shredded for almost a year now and it gets frequent home use. I still love it! Great product!
10/5/16 Update - This shredded holds up well. Very happy with my purchase!
3/27/17 Update - I just changed my rating to 5 stars from 4. I still use my shredder regularly at home and it's still working like I took it out of the box yesterday. I'm very pleased!
This shredder does an excellent job securely shredding paper and credit cards. I also like being able to pull out the bin to empty it, rather than having to lift a heavy top off a base. It is also a very good value for the price I paid.
So, the reasons I deducted a star:
1) The shredder does not micro-cut CDs, but just cuts them into rather wide strips (see photo). This allows any labeling or writing on the CD to be easily read.
2) The shredder makes more lower-frequency noise than we are used to, which can be heard in nearby offices.
This is a fine unit! Like others, my auto stop (shutoff) feature stopped working after 6 months. The paper sensor gets dirty; especially if you use oil (on paper) once in a while to lube the rotor assembly. It gets annoying to have to switch the power off after the last sheet, but you can clean the paper sensor with a rubbing alcohol pad or a q-tip dipped in alcohol.
The paper sensor is located in the center of the paper feed under the credit card symbol. Use a q-tip with alcohol and rub both the back and front sensors clean. I also ran a couple of Curad alcohol prep pads through the center of the shredder and voila, the auto stop started working again.
My goal was to find a shredder under $100 that had the smallest cut for the money and would go through staples and had a pull-out bin so I didn't have to lift the lid off to empty it. This shredder is much smaller than I expected, but I'm glad. I uploaded some pictures of it by a wine bottle to give a visual of the size. I left the wheels off since I'm keeping it on a cabinent in my utility room. It is small enough that you'll do a lot of bending if you keep it on the floor. I also uploaded a picture of the shreds beside a quarter and penny as well as a long strip of paper from a very old shredder.
It is quieter than the shredder I have at work that was about $400. It does sound much different when you use more than one sheet of paper at a time, but I don't think it is straining. I ran junk mail with a window envelope and several pages though and had no problem. My only gripe (and I thought about giving it a 4 star rating over this) is how you put paper in it. You slide it in flat from the front (another reason it works better on a counter up high) instead of putting it straight down. I'm guessing this is to keep fingers out. I'm sure I'll get used to it.
(Note: I gave this unit four stars for sentimental reasons. Honestly, I would rate this as three stars for those buying a shredder for a high-volume office scenario.)
This is an elegy for this shredder. I killed it and I am confessing publicly. I have owned and used this shredder for over three and one-half years and, short of asking it to destroy rebar, I subjected it to a lot of abuse. Sadly, it has finally died.
Seriously, for the price, it is a very good shredder with shortcomings--principally that it would not do the advertised eight-sheets-at-a-time claim; it would handle six sheets if not forced. And it won't operate for a protracted period of time like if Ollie North and Fawn Hall were feeding it Iran-Contra docs at breakneck speed into it. However, if you need to commend credit cards and the endless stream of junk solicitations you receive in the mail, this will do the trick if you are patient. Its downfall was an overly thick envelope that I did not open and feed individually. It stopped midway through and, like an idiot, I tried to force it through instead of backing it out, and feeding it through a sheet at a time.
The device DOES have burn-out protection wherein it will shut down and cool off. If you unplug it and wait 45 minutes, it will revive and continue. When it failed for me, however, the burn-out circuit did not shut down before the main gear (plastic) got stripped.
So bottom line, if you are running an office-in-the-home operation and feed this shredder a steady but slim diet of 4-sheets per pass, it will serve you well and faithfully for a long time. If you expect it to two foot ingest stacks of paper hour after hour like is done in a commercial office, it will die.
Feature Product
- High-security, micro-cut shredder with 8-sheet capacity; destroys credit cards, CDs, and DVDs (one at a time)
- Shreds paper into tiny pieces (5/32 by 15/32 inches)
- 2 minute continuous run time with 40 minute cool down time; Auto start and manual reverse to clear paper jams
- 3-gallon pullout bin; 8-3/4-inch-wide paper feed; thermal protection with auto shut-off
- Measures 16.5 by 7.75 by 12.25 inches; Backed by an AmazonBasics 1-year Limited Warranty.
- NOTE: Kindly refer the Instructional Video and the User Manual which is highly essential for the better usage.
Description
An Amazon Brand.
Shredder works very well. At first I was a little disappointed in the size of the overall unit and the bin. It seemed small, however, I quickly realized that since this is a micro-shredder, it takes a LOT of time to fill up. I had an older, cheaper, store-bought shredder that made small strips. Seemed like I was always having to empty. When I first got it, I had a couple of years of tax documents to shred and kept checking the bin to be sure it wasn’t getting full. Because of the very small shred, I only had to empty it once with my stack of documents. My older shredder I would have emptied it at least 3-4 times. Additionally, having the bin pull out is SO much easier. A lot less mess. The CD slot works great as well. Those are cut into strips, so be careful as they are sharp. I’d give this 4.5 stars. The only reason I’d not give 5 is, even though it says “8 sheets”… it seems to labor hard at that volume. I don’t normally need or want to do 8 sheets at a time, but of course I wanted to try. It did it, but didn’t sound too happy about it. But 4-6, no problem. Having the wheels is nice, but really it’s so small and portable, I didn’t think the wheels were a necessity. It is rather heavy though, so for someone older or with little strength, the wheels could come in handy.
Bought this shredder recently mainly to shred several hundred CD/DVDs accumulated over years of backup data and hard-disks image files. Considered dedicated discs shredders, but most are larger units priced much higher for office use volumes. One found for home use (Norazza DD 3001 Data Destroyer) is not widely available anymore, and it did not have favorable Internet reviews because it may, according to one reviewer, have a limited life of only around 500-800 discs. It did not cut up discs but rather punched holes in them. This system may be the cause of ineffective holes punching when the punches wear out.
The Amazon shredder cost was approx. what I paid back in end 2008 from Amazon for our Fellowes P-57Cs (still using) that was rated as an 8-sheet cross-cut unit. However the Fellows strains at more than 2 sheets at a time, so with more sheets there's a very noticeable motor slow-down and the sheets intake speed. A past review I read suggest automatically discounting a shredder stated paper rate by at least 50% to allow for marketing hype.
The Amazon shredder is much quieter that my Fellows, for both paper and discs. It does 8 paper sheets with some change in the motor noise and shred speed, but it seems to do the job. Still. I think I'll be only shredding to about 4 sheets max. at a time to limit motor over-heating.
The unit doesn't cross-cut shred discs like for paper, rather it slices each disc fed one at a time with parallel cuts into 4 segments. does so quickly without any apparent strain, not much difference from paper in noise level. Other reviewers expressed concerns that the disc slicing only into 4 segments would not provide enough data destruction, and data might be retrievable by re-assembling the segments and/or read from the individual segments. I understand this might be theoretically possible given enough effort (technical skill, equipment, time, motivation, etc.), maybe an entity like the CIA or NSA, but realistically, what's the probability that someone would at random take your discarded sliced discs or target you personally to try valuable info retrieval that may or may not exist on your chopped-up discs? If you do have some especially sensitive info on your discs, you could run each sliced segment through the shredder again to make turn each disc into 10 to 16 smaller pieces. Just as a technique, I also feed my discs through oriented so the slicing is perpendicular to any writing on the discs, making disc content identification a bit more difficult for any garbage pickers.
As a side note for those interested in digital data destruction, and analogous to the above, I also understand that it's probably not worth the time/effort to wipe a hard-disk using gov-mil-spec procedure to write zeros/ones with 3 passes when it's going to disposal or transferred to other peoples. A single pass should be sufficient for personal purposes unless you're protecting data involving critical national security matters that would obviously cause immediate harm if it got into the wrong unauthorized hands...
This Amazon shredder has worked well for the short time I've used it, only a much longer period will show it's durability over a few years. So far, I've cut up about 100 discs, and tested the paper shredding just to see how many sheets it would really do without straining.
I LOVE this shredder! I found the noise level to be quite low compared to other shredders that I have used, and I didn't have any trouble feeding paper into this, even with the paper slot being angled. If you don't get the paper in perfectly straight, the shredder works as normal - I even purposefully put a paper in at a terrible angle and the shredder pulled it through with no issues. By far my favorite part of this shredder is being able to line the can with a plastic grocery bag! It makes cleanup a breeze, and the bag in no way affects the function of the shredder or the ability to close the drawer all the way.(I searched for quite a while to find a shredder where I could do this - I hate having to empty the drawer and having little paper pieces get everywhere!) I also find that because this shreds so finely, I can shred quite a bit before I need to empty the bin - much more than my old cross-cut shredder. The top piece of this shredder is pretty heavy, but this isn't an issue for me because once you have it assembled (which takes about 2 minutes to do), you will never need to lift the top again because of the drawer sliding out to empty and the wheels included for the bottom, which work well on my carpeted room. GREAT shredder, I would definitely recommend.
Purchased this for my elderly uncle who lives in a small-ish apartment, so size and noise were important in selecting this.
Pros:
- extremely quiet and small cross cut results
- pull out bin for emptying means my frail uncle does not need to lift off the shredder top portion in order to empty it. The size of the bin also allows placing a bag in the bin for even easier disposal of the shredded bits.
- comes with wheels that you can either use or not. For my uncle, this means he can keep it under his desk and just use his foot to roll it out when he needs to use it. Space saving is important in his situation, so the ability to tuck it under his desk and not take up valuable floor space is great. Even if you left it out in the open, the footprint is less than a typical office wastebasket.
Cons:
- the only one that comes to mind, is that the pull out bin does not slide back into place in one motion. You sort of have to slide it in, then push in on the top sides so they're flush with the shredder top.
For that to be the only con that I have, this is an awesome shredder at a fantastic price.
Highly recommend!
I bought the 8 sheet micro-cut shredder for it's small size. My kitchen has a slide out cabinet the hold two small trash cans. This shredder fits in place of one of the trash cans. There is an power outlet outside the cabinet.
The CD slot is only a strip shredder, not micro-cut. The strips are 1-3/8" wide so they would be easy to piece back together. I don't know how much data is actually destroyed. A data recovery company could probably get a lot of the data back.
Follow the instructions and shred credit cards using the paper slot.
If you don't need the small size, I recommend buying one of Amazon's larger shredders (12 or 17 sheet micro-cut).
If you do need the small size, get the Amazon 6 sheet micro-cut shredder. You lose the CD shredder (which does not seem secure) and gain a bigger shredded waste bin in the same size shredder; longer run time, and lower price.
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