A Qnap NAS has a drive with some bad sectors, I want to RMA it, but before just want to figure out how to prepare a drive? It’s part of a raid 5 setup of 4 drives unencrypted. So I want to remove it and wipe it. Got a Linux machine I can use, but never done this before.

What are common Linux tools to do that sensibly?

  • Lemmchen@feddit.orgEnglish
    6·
    10 days ago

    shred

    Can also be used from KDE Partition Manager.

    Use LUKS encryption in the future.

    • Random Dent@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      10 days ago

      I assume in this context the benefit using LUKS is that even if someone does recover data from the drive, they’d just get encrypted data which is unreadable? If so, I hadn’t considered that before!

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    12 days ago

    The day job is Private Possum territory, so our agreement is

    • we won’t send in drives
    • we will send proof of destruction

    and I’m sure it costs more, but we don’t have to worry about recovered user data.

    Our stuff is also in those crazy-secure datacenters, too, so we don’t need to mess with crypto-at-rest.

      • franglais@lemm.ee
        0·
        12 days ago

        Use shred , it will automate multiple random passes, and finish with a zero pass.

        • Kvoth@lemmy.world
          1·
          12 days ago

          Completely unnecessary. Overwriting the whole drive with zeros completely stops anyone from being able to recover anything

          • franglais@lemm.ee
            1·
            11 days ago

            It won’t stop “anyone”, I’ve been lead to believe there are ways even after a single pass, to recover data. if I had anything to hide, I would use a physical destruction method, nothing else

  • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    12 days ago
    sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/[sdx] bs=4096K status=progress

    Or for multiple passes:

    sudo shred -fzv /dev/[sdx]

    Change [sdx] to the drive you want to wipe, make sure you double check it’s the right one.

  • socphoenix@midwest.social
    1·
    13 days ago

    Assuming the drive writes normally a simple command like

    dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sdX

    Where sdX is the location of the drive should do the trick. Depending on drive time this may take a bit.

  • solrize@lemmy.world
    1·
    12 days ago

    If the drive has bad sectors that it can’t read right now, it likely had other sectors that were marginal and got copied (remapped) to new spare sectors before they became unreadable. So there is still potentially recoverable data in the remapped sectors, and not much you can do about it.

    Basically, writing zeros to the disk is about as good as you can hope for. If your data is s00per seekrit to the point where you can’t stand the possibility of any bits at all being recovered, you basically have to melt the drive. Otherwise, zero it and send it in.

    Next time, set up encryption ahead of time, so your new drives never see plaintext. Some drives have a “secure erase” feature that is basically a crappy version of this built into the drive.

  • dingdongitsabear@lemmy.ml
    1·
    12 days ago

    no help to you, but a heads-up to anybody yet to deploy disks in such a scenario: always use encryption by way of LUKS2. you can set it up easily to unlock it on boot by a key file on the boot drive, thumb drive, TPM and such. so when a drive gets sold, RMA’d, etc., you got none of these issues.

    source: sold my old drives recently and the shred procedure took ages. the new ones are encrypted so none of that shit no more.

  • Gayhitler@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    10 days ago

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/(your drive)

    You can do status=progress if you want like someone else posted and if you pick a block size go with either the physical block size reported by the disk in smartcontrol or some multiple of it that coincides with a big even division of your controllers memory. The drives physical block size will be “easy” for the drive, bigger blocks are faster.

    People saying physical destruction are operating in a different world than you and people saying urandom or shred are operating off old (>30 years) information. The same technology that makes ssds unrecoverable black boxes was originally developed and deployed in spinning drives to eek out speed gains because the disk itself can be expected to know better than the operating system where to put shit and makes techniques (which were postulated but never actually implemented successfully in the wild) to recover overwritten data infeasible.

    Alternately just reformat it and don’t worry. No one doing drive rmas cares about your data. They’re already on the razors edge with feedback and customer trust, you think they’re gonna burn their above board bread and butter to run a harvesting operation for a few bucks on the side? That’s usually the purview of your local pc repair shop…

  • randombullet@programming.dev
    0·
    12 days ago

    When I sold my drives, I used veracrypt with a 128 character password and PIM of 800+.

    Isn’t that the same thing as shredding?