Comercial drive wiping

Sup Sup Forums

I'm an undergrad associates in IT who just got a job of reselling servers. Part of my job requirement is finding a cost effective and legally compliant method of wiping drives from servers, personal computers, and drive arrays. Simply scrambling the arrays isn't good enough. What are my best options, preferably with cost on the low end? Its a little hard to sell servers with 8 drives for $150 when each drive license in DBAN is over $8 each. Whether from windows, Linux, or self contained nuke disc.

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Screwdriver to take the magnets out (they come in handy)
Drill and bit for the rest, two or three holes will do.


Dban is free if you want to use it, it can take a fair bit of time to erase 100% Just make it a bootable USB

I mean, we already tear down drives not worth keeping and recycle the precious metals, but the servers we sell mostly sell for boards and drives. We have all these server grade SAS/SCSI that go for 20-30 bucks a pop each on themselves. The value and interest of the servers go down significantly if they don't have the drive bays filled. Some people are actually more interested in the drives than they are the server, so preventing actual destruction is the goal. If the company we are selling for wanted the drives destroyed vs sold, they would have done it before handing it off. Its actually kinda sad man, you should have seen the shipment of 250g and 500g SSDs we had all with the pins and controllers smashed off. Over a hundred completely ruined SSDs.

Oh yeah, DBAN is free for personal use, but if we get caught using the personal version vs a commercial license copy, we get shit. Actually the reason I'm asking for help on this is we sold a server with one of the drives not wiped and some license was activated once it was hooked up to the internet outside part of the company's network, and they were notified. They weren't happy.

Someone fooled you. DBAN is free software.
Otherwise look for military requirements for wiping non-secret data in your country. Would be legal enough.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=4096

isnt it the other way around?

No, if=input file, of=output file

I'll look again, but I swore it was only free for personal use, and that as soon as I used it in a commercial environment, I had to pay for licensing. I cant afford half assing this or grey areas because we can get fined up the ass and I'm personally responsible for this entire division of the company. I have to answer to contracts with other multimillion dollar companies. Id rather not get on their bad side or get my boss in trouble. Fucking up could actually get the company to cease the division and ruin corporate relations, so I have to 100% sure.

DBAN is under GPL. The copyrights were bought by a finnish company that builds their own program on top of DBAN, but the original simple boot disk is FOSS.

That makes sense now that you mention it. I'll look into it again. Thanks for an answer mate.

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Neato!

fuck off you fat cunt

boot from usb
dd if=/dev/urandom the drive a few times
zero it

done

just make your own version of dban

Then just use GNU/shred.

thats a good call, i always forget you can shred drives and not just files

I'm not familiar with DBAN but I would image it's a fancy shred wrapper.

We use a Mac specifically to wipe drives because its disk utility supports up to 35 pass erasure. We only need three passes to satisfy legal though. Typically we will load 12 drives into a raid enclosure and run a 3 pass wipe on a RAID1 array. I've done as many as three arrays simultaneously which is about 30% slower than doing a single, but you're getting a 170% increase in wiping speed.

Don't have access to mac, but it sounds effective. Also the GNU/shred was another one I was thinking about. I mean, two days ago I was trying to use CCleaner within windows to shred the disk then unformat them so any option sounds better at this point.

That's not a case software can fix. That's something for company policy and double checking every drive gets wiped.

Yeah, I meant that as in, I wasn't aware it wasn't wiped properly from the company handing off. They claimed they did, but we still got the flack for the fuck up on my second sale. So I cant take people's word for it, all drives must be wiped all the time. I just needed a way to do it. I got DBAN running and its going at a decent pace and to the standards I need, and given the base program is GPL, this will work for me thanks to everyone here and their pointers.

blanco

Hint: 7 pass DoD wipe is a meme. Even with 1 pass there's 0 chance of recovering any data. Those are antics from tens of years ago.

That is the repackage that cost money.
I know. I told my boss this too, but it doesn't matter. We have regulations to comply to and so I have to throw it down for 3 wipes at least.

WOULDN'T IT BE BETTER TO USE RANDOM, BECAUSE ZERO WOLD LEAVE TRACES

Can you document a single instance of successful data recovery from a drive that has been zeroed out within the last 10 years ?
Just one intact file is enough.

The NSA and CIA don't publish their successes.

>this

You think the DoD requires a certain level of cleaning for show? They know what the NSA and CIA have done and they safeguard against it.

And in what instance do you think that NSA and CIA might even consider recovering a drive that has been zeroed out ?
Think about how sensitive your data REALLY is. Would a hypothetical agency pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to recover your pictures of smug anime girls ?
No, they wouldn't.

No, but they would be interested in YOUR cheese pizza.

Not interested enough to recover a zeroed out drive for it.

Dude, they quite literally exist to spy on people. Yes, using random might take a bit more time, but I still prefer it over someone looking into my files. Maybe my data isn't sensitive, but this doesn't mean I want anyone looking through it.

CIA in particular has been known to spend lots of money on useless shit, yes.

>plug in drives into windows machine
for each drive
>format
>cipher /w