Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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RMAing a large HDD that has pirated movies/games on it, is it necessary to completely zero the drive? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by silvio_dante@alien.top to c/datahoarder@selfhosted.forum

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The manufacturer requires that the faulty HDD be sent back. It's 18 TB, so ShredOS estimates 100 hours to completely wipe the drive. I really would rather not go through that. Does anyone else have experience with this?

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[–] stoatwblr@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Data erasure procedures are built into the drive (and have been for decades). Search for "ATA erase howto"

Faffing around with "erasure utilities" is a waste of time and effort

ATA secure disk erase should change the pre existing encryption key and effectively wipe the drive beyond recovery in seconds

Even if the drive does it the long way, the command itself only takes a few seconds to issue, doesn't tie up tbe computer whilst the procedure is underway and is MORE effective than any kind of software wipe - particularly for any kind of shingled drive, where it's the only valid way of erasing a drive

Peter Guttman's famous recovery of data with an atomic force microscope was performed on stepper-motor based 5-10MB drives and has not been able to be replicated on 200MB ones let alone anything larger.

He issued a followup paper to the original stating that most "military grade overwrite" and other claims are simply voodoo/mumbo-jumbo on modern drives (2-10GB at the time he wrote it)

multiple overwrite procedures were created in the days of 10-12 inch platters and stepper motors without disk head tracking servos - for the simple reason that the military mindset usually wanted to blow old equipment up whilst technical staff wanted safer/cheaper/more effective methods which could be done before data left sensitive areas