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!
And if you’re concenred on data written on sectors since reallocated you should physically destroy the whole drive anyways. With SSDs this is even more complicated, but I like to keep it pretty simple. If the data which has been stored on the drive at any point of it’s life is under any kind of NDA or other higly valuable contract it’s getting physically destroyed. If the drive spent it’s life storing my family photos a single run of zeroes with dd is enough.
At the end the question is that if at any point the drive held bits of anything even remotely near a cost of a new drive. If it did it’s hammer time, if it didn’t, most likely just wiping the partition table is enough. I’ve given away old drives with just ‘dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=100M count=1’. On any system that appears as a blank drive and while it’s possible to recover the files from the drive it’s good enough for the donated drives. Everything else is either drilled trough multiple times or otherwise physically destroyed.
Some SSD drives can do a secure erase via block encryption where the key is stored on the drive itself. There is a command that simply generates a new key - Voilà your drive now contains random bits. I don’t know if newer spinning rust drives have this feature too.