Re: Wiping hard drives - Re: debian-user-digest Digest V2011 #1704
On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 10:23 PM, Scott Ferguson
<prettyfly.productions@gmail.com> wrote:
> I use Dban and shred (stick them in an old machine and take as long as
> it takes) - then disable the drive (pin in the breather hole), pliers on
> the power connectors.
DBAN is definitely one of the better tools out there, but it has
weaknesses that have to be considered. For example, it believes the
drive ID and info. It uses that info to determine what needs to be
done (e.g., number of sectors to be written). If the drive is working
and being replaced to increase capacity, that it not a problem. But a
drive being replaced due to unreliability or with intermittent errors
can deceive DBAN which will happily scrub only the number of sectors
reported by the corrupted firmware.
So when you run it, particularly when doing batches of drives, you
have to verify that the ID and drive info matches the specs on the
drive.
Lee Winter
Nashua, New Hampshire
United States of America (NDY)
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