A zero fill isn't enough if you have access to the circuit board of the hard drive and can read the analog signals from the heads. Darik's Boot And Nuke (DBAN) defaults to three random write passes and one zero fill, which is plenty. I've used it on
a PowerEdge 2550, 2650, and 2850 with success, so it should work on just about anything except any SPARC or POWER servers.
To get roughly the same thing out of dd, you could set if=/dev/urandom, run it three times and then set if=/dev/zero. It's not the same quality of randomness, but by then, the drive is certainly nuked. A metal shredder is way faster, though.
On 07/17/13 10:37, Al Puzzuoli wrote:
Hi everyone,
I understand that when old computers and servers go to salvage, the drives in those computers are wiped, but what about free floating drives? We have several old drives that were formerly part of an array. If we pass those onto salvage,
will they be disposed of securely?
Thanks,
Al Puzzuoli
Michigan State University
Information Technologist
http://www.rcpd.msu.edu
Resource Center for Persons with Disabilities 517-884-1915 120 Bessey Hall East Lansing, MI 48824-1033
Why don't you hook them up to any kind of unix like system and do
something like
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd0c bs=64k (OpenBSD example)
to be sure?
--STeve Andre'