Permanently erasing Disk Array

[dstosic]

I need to dispose of number of HP and IBM servers and need to permanently erase data on the disk arrays according to DOD standards.

I am looking for free or paid software that will do the job. So if anyone had any experience with this, I would greatly appreciate some feedback.

Thanks in advance for your help with this matter.

Dragan Stosic

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

DBAN or if you have access to a Ghost Disk you can use Norton's GDISK.

Or thermite.

 

[Harvey]

See this article on ZDnet. It links to this page where you can download a free utility to perform secure disk erasure, a PDF tutorial on the subject, an informative ReadMe text file and a Q&A doc file.

The downloadable info files are also contained in the zipped file containing the program.

 

[Rifter]

DBAN, or if you are super paranoid thermite is really the only way to be 100% sure.

 

[dstosic]

Thank you guys for you replies.
Harvey, I actually tried this software yesterday but got stuck on P0 is NONE.
I will try DBAN today.
Jeffrey, i love your quote.

Thanks again guys for your help.

 

[Modelworks]

No such things as DOD standards anymore as they don't use software to erase drives, they shred and then melt them. That standard is from almost 20 years ago when drives were very expensive and recycled.

Right over it 1 time and you are good to go.
dd command in linux can do it.

If you just want the data destroyed, drive shredding services are the way to go.
http://www.expressdestruction.com/resources/hard-drive-shredding.php

Express Destruction offers the best value in hard drive shredding with up to 20 hard drives shredded for under $50.

 

[sub.mesa]

DBAN is good enough. Even NSA will have great trouble recovering data after a healthy 15/20 rewrites; not much to recover in that case even with mechanical residue it's virtually impossible to recreate the contents; even if you could gotten an old track on a single sector you wouldn't know if it was the real data or one of the DBAN cycles.

So you don't have to physically destroy a HDD if you want to make sure no one can access the information it once stored. That sounds a bit paranoid to me. But i can understand if the data is really sensitive then the costs of the physical HDD pale in comparison of the worth of keeping the data confidential. Only in those circumstances would destroying your HDD make sense to me.

 

[Russwinters]

1 Pass is enough.


The NSA doesn't have some magic machine that sucks that overwritten data off of the platters.

It has been attempted, but it doesn't work on anything practical.


There are MRM machines that can view the magnetic patterns of a disc to an extent, but it can't be converted into usable data.