January 3, 201115 yr 1. I assume that most people wipe a flaky disk before they RMA it? If so, what's the general suggestion on how to go about getting a secure erase (as best you can get with a failing drive)? What about running the pre-clear script? 2. Is wiping a failing parity drive even necessary? Or just worry about the data drives? Appreciate your thoughts - about to send back a Samsung 1TB drive I was using as parity. AGW
January 3, 201115 yr Nah, I don't bother. If a drive is flaky I generally catch it with preclear before I ever put any important data on it. While I don't think the preclear script is really a completely secure means of wiping a drive, it is probably a lot more than most people do. If you are really paranoid about an important data disk, you could use something like this: http://www.dban.org/ Careful with that - I would physically disconnect any drive you care about before using it just to be sure. Wiping a parity drive is unnecessary. Without the rest of the data drives (or at least all but one) the parity drive is just a meaningless mess of 1s and 0s.
January 3, 201115 yr Wiping a parity drive is unnecessary. Without the rest of the data drives (or at least all but one) the parity drive is just a meaningless mess of 1s and 0s. That's assuming the user is running more than 1 data drive. If the user is only running 1 Data drive and 1 Parity drive, the Parity drive will be an exact mirror of the data drive starting at sector 63 onward. All that's needed to turn that parity drive into a capable data drive is a standard MBR and Partition information.
January 3, 201115 yr Author Thanks guys. I don't really have any top-secret or incriminating data that I'm that concerned about, but I do have photos, movies, taxes, etc that I'd prefer to have erased from my parity drive before I put it into someone else's hands. Even if it's not completely erased, anything that makes it harder for someone to reconstruct / sift through the data is my goal. And I am currently running just my one data drive and the parity drive. The parity drive is about 2.5 years old - probably been using in my unRAID server for a little over a year. I ran a parity check the other day and at about 85% it started kicking back all kinds of read errors and the parity check slowed to a crawl. The SMART data started showing increasing pending sectors on a subsequent parity check, so I pulled the drive and ran Samsung's diagnostic utility and it failed a full surface scan and then a low-level format. So, I'm going to RMA it while I still have a few months of warranty coverage. AGW
January 3, 201115 yr If you have more than one data drive the parity drive will just have a meaningless jumble of bits on it. Because you only have one data drive the parity disk is a nearly exact mirror of your data disk, so your concern is valid. If you are concerned about the casual snooper, a preclear_disk.sh cycle will erase everything on it. There is always this if you are really concerned: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGXh6RVTuq0&feature=related Joe L.
January 3, 201115 yr Author Thanks Joe. The mechanical crusher seems a bit over-the-top for me, but I do have a couple of toddlers that I could give the hard drive to and they would probably inflict a comparable amount of damage in about the same amount of time. But then I wouldn't be able to RMA the drive . . . I'll throw the preclear script at it and see what happens.
January 3, 201115 yr Thanks Joe. The mechanical crusher seems a bit over-the-top for me Then I guess this probably won't do either... http://eecue.com/c/driveslag (I can almost guarantee data privacy, but... as you said, a difficult RMA process. ) Joe L.
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.