Wiping Multiple SAS Drives

[gikstar]

I have 40 - 2.5" SAS drives that I need to wipe clean. I have a Dell R610 which has 6 - 2.5" bays that I can use to do the wiping.
Does anyone have experience in wiping multiple drives at one time? If so, what software do you use?
Thanks

 

[Markverhyden]

What are the particular circumstances? Do you have to provide a document or cert? There are several ways to achieve that.

DBAN has been a favorite for years.

Another way would be to use Truecrypt which does a true FDE. Not all products do that. In the RAID controller build all 6 disks into a RAID 5 load a basic Windoze OS, no drivers needed, install truecrypt and do a FDE. Then boot from a live *nix distro and delete the partition and save.

Personally I'd probably just do the following. Load the drives in the RAID as JBOD. Then boot from a *nix live distro. Get the list of the drives and open a CLI window for each device. Then run dd on each device.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd"x"

 

[gikstar]

Personally I'd probably just do the following. Load the drives in the RAID as JBOD. Then boot from a *nix live distro. Get the list of the drives and open a CLI window for each device. Then run dd on each device.

Fortunately I do not have to provide any documentation.
Can you use this code and have it running on each of the six drives at one time?

 

[Slaters Kustum Machines]

I boot to Ubuntu live CD and run sudo shred /dev/sd* -n 5 -vzf
Source

 

[lcoughey]

We just use:

Ddrescue --force /dev/zero /dev/sd[x]

This is pretty much the same as the earlier dd command, but with a log.

Be sure to verify that the drive HPA is off and you have full LBA access before you start the wipe.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

At the rate we wipe servers (let's say the average is 1x server per month...6 drives per server average)....since those interfaces are often different brand brand, not swap or not, generation, it's actually less time consuming (and less expensive) to just physically destroy them. Our bench guy takes them apart and destroys the platters.

 

[Markverhyden]

Fortunately I do not have to provide any documentation.
Can you use this code and have it running on each of the six drives at one time?

Yes. Open up one CLI session per device.

 

[gikstar]

At the rate we wipe servers (let's say the average is 1x server per month...6 drives per server average)....since those interfaces are often different brand brand, not swap or not, generation, it's actually less time consuming (and less expensive) to just physically destroy them. Our bench guy takes them apart and destroys the platters.

I got these with the intention to reuse them in a number of Dell R610's and R710's that we have. Fortunately they are identical drives from two different manufacturers. Once I get through these 40 I have 50+ more available to me

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I got these with the intention to reuse them in a number of Dell R610's and R710's that we have. Fortunately they are identical drives from two different manufacturers. Once I get through these 40 I have 50+ more available to me

Ahh...makes sense then.

 

[Eagle21]

Parted Magic Secure Erase lets you wipe multiple drives at once, and provides log files.
http://partedmagic.com/secure-erase/
Using the hard drive built in secure erase command should be much faster than other methods of wiping data.

(Parted Magic also provides many other 'traditional' data wipe methods too)

 

[Altster]

Dban will do multiple drives at one time in a computer. Esp.. nice if you are running a server with RAID capabilities.

Another program is "WipeDrive Enterprise". We came across this is a CD (or maybe it was a DVD) drive some time ago and we've used that to do multi drivers in one machine.