Erasing all data


Haruno

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1 hour ago, Haruno said:

I am no longer really using my system and I'm going use some drives for other projects and will sell a few. Is there a way to erase all data on all drives? I have searched the forums but couldn't find a clear way to do it on all drives simultaneously.

A couple thoughts:

 

1. If by any chance your array was encrypted, then you can safely assume the drives are cryptographically wiped if you get rid of the master key, even more so if you erase the per-drive LUKS key store on each drive (a momentary operation). Let me know if this is the case and I can help with doing the latter.

 

2. Since you're talking about completely decommissioning your system, we can take some liberties with it. Assuming array is unmounted and stopped(!), collect all the X's in /dev/sdX of the drives you want to erase. Assuming for example that those are /dev/sdc, /dev/sdd and /dev/sdf, you can then do: 

for X in {c, d, f} ; do shred -n 1 /dev/sd$X & done ; wait ; echo -e "\n\nThat's all, folks!"

This has the advantage of running all the shredding tasks in parallel. This may cut total time considerably (depending on h/w setup). It will take time, and will also get all of the drives quite hot in the process, so mind your cooling 🙂

Make sure you get the letters above right (or you may end up shredding your USB drive, unassigned drives and whatnot).

 

Once this is done, your drives will look unformatted (i.e no partition table).

 

The above is hacked up, but I see no reason why it shouldn't work.

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