The manufacturer requires that the faulty HDD be sent back. It’s 18 TB, so ShredOS estimates 100 hours to completely wipe the drive. I really would rather not go through that. Does anyone else have experience with this?
Those are all your legitimate backups. What are you talking about?
Oops you’re right, my bad!
100 hours seems excessive. If you want to zero a drive, one pass is plenty.
Yeah I didn’t realize until you said this that the default option on ShredOS is a 3 pass… that explains the 100 hours.
No one cares. I’d quick format it and call it a day. There’s no chain of custody so it’s never proof of anything in any sense that matters.
Yeah, this is the rational line of thinking honestly. I just overly worry.
I’m pretty sure the oem is not hooking up every rma drive and looking for files.
“well, new rma drive? Let’s pop it in the USB caddy and see what’s there… Hmm, some files… jpgs… Mpegs… Oh look. Pdfs with embedded viruses. Good thing we didn’t connect this drive to… Oops”
They’re sending that thing straight to the industrial degausser and then certification for possible resale.
With your logic we would not have recertified drives.
As company policy? No. But their employees are people too.
I used to work for a large ISP that shall remain nameless. The ISP abuse department absolutely DID look at every pub ftp they were told to shut down, and grabbed whatever they found interesting before shutting it down. There may even have been a massive MP3 share on one of their servers to store their ill-gotten gains.
Absolutely NOT company policy, but it happened.
But the question here is: should OP worry about his ‘linux isos’ getting him in trouble. Even accounting for overly curious employees, the answer is still NO.
There may even have been a massive MP3 share
I never understood the “gotta have 'em all” mentality of mp3 collecting.
“Hey! Check out my massive collection of bitrate/dynamic range/frequency range -decimated music. I don’t need CDs anymore.”
You should use ATA Secure Erase, it is much faster then most if not all the other methods. It generally works better on failing drives in my experience as well.
There are various ways to do it depending on your system/OS. Some BIOS have an ATA Secure Erase option built into them. (Parted Magic has a nice GUI, hdparm, etc.)
It has been a while since I used it on a super large drive, but I am guessing your 18TB will take a few hours.
Just make sure to select the correct drive (or have it be the only drive in the system preferable) as there is no recovery if you choose the wrong drive.
If the drive has Instant Secure Erase ISE or something, you can get it done in just few minutes. Data in rendered unreadable.
This is why I do full disk encryption always. Throwing it out is much easier.
Drillbit takes care of that nicely.
If you’re really worried about it, grab a free Linux dvd from a random computer magazine. Ctrl+A, then delete everything on the drive. Empty the recycle bin. Now copy and paste the dvd onto the drive as many times as it takes to fill it completely. When done, Ctrl+A again, delete and empty recycle bin again.
If you’ve got an agreed RMA, they’re not going to go a deep dive file recovery, they’ll be logging the serial number in a database and chucking the drive in the recycle pile. Emptying, filling and emptying again is more than enough.
No one will mind. If it lets you sleep better at night, wipe it if possible. They just put it onto a test system, see if it is really broken and throw it into a bin container for recycling.
Worst that can happen is, that someone want’s to have your movie collection and restores it off the HDD on a side setup for personal use. No one will forward it to the movie association for legal prosecution!
Data erasure procedures are built into the drive (and have been for decades). Search for “ATA erase howto”
Faffing around with “erasure utilities” is a waste of time and effort
ATA secure disk erase should change the pre existing encryption key and effectively wipe the drive beyond recovery in seconds
Even if the drive does it the long way, the command itself only takes a few seconds to issue, doesn’t tie up tbe computer whilst the procedure is underway and is MORE effective than any kind of software wipe - particularly for any kind of shingled drive, where it’s the only valid way of erasing a drive
Peter Guttman’s famous recovery of data with an atomic force microscope was performed on stepper-motor based 5-10MB drives and has not been able to be replicated on 200MB ones let alone anything larger.
He issued a followup paper to the original stating that most “military grade overwrite” and other claims are simply voodoo/mumbo-jumbo on modern drives (2-10GB at the time he wrote it)
multiple overwrite procedures were created in the days of 10-12 inch platters and stepper motors without disk head tracking servos - for the simple reason that the military mindset usually wanted to blow old equipment up whilst technical staff wanted safer/cheaper/more effective methods which could be done before data left sensitive areas
I wouldn’t worry personally. I sent a 16tb Iron Wolf to Seagate that shit the bed. It exclusively had pirated movies/shows/games. The free recovery didn’t pull anything, so they just sent me a new drive instead.
My experience this year, I claimed on a Seagate NAS + 6 Ironwolf drives. Had a fair bit of moves/tv, they did data recovery for me as well.
There was no issue & I was assured my digital content would be treated as private and confidential.
Isn’t the format drive without ticking quick format on Windows the same? It took me around 36hrs for the 5TB yesterday
You should always zero a drive, if you can before sending back.
If a drive ever has sensitive data and you can’t zero it, you shouldn’t ever return it.
All good advice this time. Next time crypto the drive. Remember you can’t wipe a dead drive so if you’re super paranoid crypto it before hand then you don’t care.
It’s true you can’t wipe a dead drive if you want to return it and get it RMA’d. On the other hand, I’m willing to bet a hard drive with a few 1/2” holes in it —or platters that got too close to an orbital sander—is going to be recovered by anyone other than a state actor with an agenda.