I need to be able to wipe the HDDs in my Drobo when they come out, not just mark the lead bits for space reuse. Since clicking ‘reset’ so quickly clears the entire drive it is obviously not doing this.
The process involves anywhere between 1 to 35 passes over the entire drive. Will the Drobo accommodate these wipes?
Thanks for any comments.
No, it won’t as far as I know. I’d just pull the drive out and secure-wipe it on a computer.
I haven’t look at a drive, but Drobo’s re-use of blocks via Thin Provisioning accompanied with its data distribution for redundancy I imagine would make for a very odd smattering of leftover data.
I second this. Take the drives out and use whatever tool you are using today.
Thanks to all!
It appears I did deduce correctly the inherent inability to pull full sets of usable data from a single Drobo HDD if separated from the Drive Pack. This, along with my other question about reading HDDs used in a Drobo is exactly what I needed to know, both for “can I” and “how to”.
what tool is known to be effective (but safe)?
eg ages ago i used some kind of secure wipe maybe a norton cwsshredder or something on win98 and im sure that same day that drive ended up with bad sectors[hr]
edit: i used it to wipe free space, or erase a folder (with contents)
Ban sectors due to a wipe are caused because of the extreme stress your putting the drive under plus possible physical movement of the drive (touching it, bumping your case, etc) during the wipe process. It is not a fault of the program it self.
Unless you have some kind of military grade secrets that need to be removed from the drive, I don’t see any reason you should EVER be doing extremely large number pass wipes on a drive you plan on to continue to use afterwards, you are lowering the life span of your drive considerably.
yup i guess it makes sense only to do something like that with secret stuff like cola and kfc recipes - just before the drive is discarded etc 