Proper HDD clear process?

Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 56 points –

Usually my process is very... hammer and drill related - but I have a family member who is interested in taking my latest batch of hard drives after I upgraded.

What are the best (linux) tools for the process? I'd like to run some tests to make sure they're good first and also do a full zero out of any data. (Used to be a raid if that matters)

Edit: Thanks all, process is officially started, will probably run for quite a while. Appreciate the advice!

51

You are viewing a single comment

why don't just zeroes from the start?, instead of using random data and them zeroes it?

Just doing a single pass all the same like zeroes, often still leaves the original data recoverable. Doing passes of random data and then zeroing it lowers the chance that the original data can be recovered.

The "can" in can be recovered means "if a state sponsored attacker thinks that you have nuclear secrets on that drive, they can spend millions and recover data by manually analyzing the magnetic flux in a clean room lab" not "you can recover it by running this program"

1 more...