A Qnap NAS has a drive with some bad sectors, I want to RMA it, but before just want to figure out how to prepare a drive? It’s part of a raid 5 setup of 4 drives unencrypted. So I want to remove it and wipe it. Got a Linux machine I can use, but never done this before.
What are common Linux tools to do that sensibly?
I’d recommend /dev/urandom instead of /dev/zero
Use shred , it will automate multiple random passes, and finish with a zero pass.
Completely unnecessary. Overwriting the whole drive with zeros completely stops anyone from being able to recover anything
It won’t stop “anyone”, I’ve been lead to believe there are ways even after a single pass, to recover data. if I had anything to hide, I would use a physical destruction method, nothing else
If you’re that paranoid about it, then just physically destroy the drive.
I work for an it department who resells their old stock online, we scrub the disks before sales, physical destruction is not possible.
That’s the companies decision and they should understand the risks.
This is a miss understanding. Deleting it doesn’t actually delete the data, just the meta data. Overwrite it and it’s gone forever
Yeh, you’re right