RMAing a large HDD that has pirated movies/games on it, is it necessary to completely zero the drive?
RMAing a large HDD that has pirated movies/games on it, is it necessary to completely zero the drive?
The manufacturer requires that the faulty HDD be sent back. It's 18 TB, so ShredOS estimates 100 hours to completely wipe the drive. I really would rather not go through that. Does anyone else have experience with this?
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Data erasure procedures are built into the drive (and have been for decades). Search for "ATA erase howto"
Faffing around with "erasure utilities" is a waste of time and effort
ATA secure disk erase should change the pre existing encryption key and effectively wipe the drive beyond recovery in seconds
Even if the drive does it the long way, the command itself only takes a few seconds to issue, doesn't tie up tbe computer whilst the procedure is underway and is MORE effective than any kind of software wipe - particularly for any kind of shingled drive, where it's the only valid way of erasing a drive
Peter Guttman's famous recovery of data with an atomic force microscope was performed on stepper-motor based 5-10MB drives and has not been able to be replicated on 200MB ones let alone anything larger.
He issued a followup paper to the original stating that most "military grade overwrite" and other claims are simply voodoo/mumbo-jumbo on modern drives (2-10GB at the time he wrote it)
multiple overwrite procedures were created in the days of 10-12 inch platters and stepper motors without disk head tracking servos - for the simple reason that the military mindset usually wanted to blow old equipment up whilst technical staff wanted safer/cheaper/more effective methods which could be done before data left sensitive areas