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!
Usually, I use
shred:shred -vfz -n 2 /dev/device-name-v: verbose mode-f: forces the write permissions if missing-z: zeroes the disk in the final pass-n 2: 2 passes w/ random dataShred is what I used when destroying a bunch of old drives.
Then I disassbled them to pull out the magnets and platters (because they’re shiny and cool). A couple had torx screws that I didn’t have the right end for so I ran a hdd magnet over the surface and scratched them with a screwdriver.
I have an inch-high stack of platters now. Kind of interesting to see how their thickness has changed over the years, including a color change in there somewhere. Keep thinking I should bury them in epoxy on some table top.
For extra fun, you ca melt the casings and cast interesting shapes. I only wish I were smart enough to repurpose the spindle motors.
Make sure you wear lung protection when you deal with those. They’re terrible for your insides.
why don’t just zeroes from the start?, instead of using random data and them zeroes it?
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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”