Comments on RMA of flaky drive


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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

 

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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.

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