I bought an AVS-10/4 a few months ago to replace my old desktop that I had running unRAID. Now that I have the new server in place, and I have all my data migrated, I want to purge it so I can give it to a friend to use.  My question is, how do I wipe all the drives?

I bought an AVS-10/4 a few months ago to replace my old desktop that I had running unRAID. Now that I have the new server in place, and I have all my data migrated, I want to purge it so I can give it to a friend to use.  My question is, how do I wipe all the drives?

How secure do you want to wipe it? If you don't care if something could be recovered if drive recovery software was utilized, then simply changing drive formats to something other than what they are currently and letting unraid format them will present a blank drive. If you really want to wipe the data completely, then preclear will do a good job of making sure nothing could ever be recovered except possibly by a governmental agency.

 

You could also use dd to write zeroes to the first few MB of the drives, which will wipe the partition and format info, but not the data, similar to switching format from reiserfs to xfs.

 

Lots of options, depending on how secure you want and how much time you want to let it percolate. Secure is going to take much more time.

One way would be to preclear each disk. There are command line options that would let you just do the zeroing step.

 

Alternatively, and much faster, you could change the filesystem on each drive and reformat the disks. Only works with 6.x. Your friend could use reiseefsck to recover the data if he knew what he was doing.

 

You could do something similar with pre 6.0 by zeroing orur the beginning of the disks with the preclear script (I think it is the -z option). You could then reformat. Same risk as above.

 

Great minds think alike! My answer a little different so posting anyway.

I agree with the above posts. Like most things there is a trade-off between time and security.

 

The shortest approach could take less then an hour (changing the format)

The longest approach could take a few days (writing 0's with preclear). Upto you to decide how important the data was, and how much time it's worth to clean it. 

If data security is not an issue, even faster would be to take each drive out, connect to PC using USB dock, use Disk Manager, delete partition. Rinse and repeat for each drive. Leave the formatting to the next user.

With friends like you, who needs enemies! Or acquaintances... haha