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    Fastest Secure Wipe?

    I'm planning on selling about half a dozen extra USB 3.0 hard drives on Craigslist. If I do a non-quick format in Windows 10 is that good enough? Or some other solution?
    Last edited by shovenose; 11-14-2017, 02:23 PM.

    #2
    Re: Fastest Secure Wipe?

    there is a hardware based secure wipe, you can activate it with the manufacturer tools.
    it really depends what you want to hide - are they from the clintons? hillary wiped them with a cloth

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      #3
      Re: Fastest Secure Wipe?

      No, any format in Windows, quick or not just checks for bad sectors, it deletes no data at all except for the file allocation table!
      There is an old startup disk called "dban" that can do wipes allot of different ways.
      Newer hard drives (And SSD's) also support something called "secure erase"
      This is a SMART command that instructs the drive itself to delete data.
      This is better because for example it will also clear info otherwise hidden from the OS:
      Like the reserved areas for bad sectors, and on SSD's the over provisioning area.

      One such program: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDDerase
      Last edited by Per Hansson; 11-14-2017, 02:54 PM.
      "The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the one who is doing it."

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        #4
        Re: Fastest Secure Wipe?

        I'm familiar with dban, didn't feel like dedicating a laptop booted to that all day. guess i'll go that route though thanks lol

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          #5
          Re: Fastest Secure Wipe?

          If you have many drives you could use the secure erase command.
          As the drive will execute it internally you could issue it and then just disconnect the SATA cable while keeping the drive powered on.
          Just make sure to see how long it normally should take to complete.
          Usually software like HDAT2 will show you this before you issue the command...
          "The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the one who is doing it."

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            #6
            Re: Fastest Secure Wipe?

            well crap, dban doesn't work on usb. i'm going to use ccleaner's 3-pass disk wipe so i can do it from within windows and still use my computer(s). manufacturer utilities are out because these drives are all various brands and some oem drives in aftermarket enclosures.

            should be secure enough yes? i means sure if somebody wants to give DriveSavers several thousand dollars, they could get my data, but honestly they aren't gonna bother.
            Last edited by shovenose; 11-14-2017, 03:08 PM.

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              #7
              Re: Fastest Secure Wipe?

              Originally posted by shovenose View Post
              should be secure enough yes? i means sure if somebody wants to give DriveSavers several thousand dollars, they could get my data, but honestly they aren't gonna bother.
              No, that's just fairytales.
              Overwritten is overwritten, no way it's getting back!
              The secure erase method is nice though.
              Because otherwise quite allot of data will still be on the drive as explained before.
              Especially in SSD's with their large over provisioning.
              But actually modern hard drives are the same.
              They have more ECC and voodoo going on to make you data readable than you would imagine!
              "The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the one who is doing it."

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                #8
                Re: Fastest Secure Wipe?

                I've always DBAN'd them since low level formatting became obsolete with the death of SCSI.
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                  #9
                  Re: Fastest Secure Wipe?

                  you heretic - SCSI will never die!!
                  i have enough to last a few decades!!

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                    #10
                    Re: Fastest Secure Wipe?

                    Originally posted by stj View Post
                    you heretic - SCSI will never die!!
                    i have enough to last a few decades!!
                    LOL...so do I....the problem I've ran into trying to continue using it with modern OS's is 64 bit drivers....none of the 'old trusty' controllers (mainly adaptec) are supported either in linux or windows... 32 bit OS's all seem to have embedded drivers, but 64, nada.
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                      #11
                      Re: Fastest Secure Wipe?

                      ^ Really? Ive got an AHA-2940UW that works great with Linux..... My UEFI BIOS, Not so much.
                      Things I've fixed: anything from semis to crappy Chinese $2 radios, and now an IoT Dildo....

                      "Dude, this is Wyoming, i hopped on and sent 'er. No fucking around." -- Me

                      Excuse me while i do something dangerous


                      You must have a sad, sad boring life if you hate on people harmlessly enjoying life with an animal costume.

                      Sometimes you need to break shit to fix it.... Thats why my lawnmower doesn't have a deadman switch or engine brake anymore

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                        #12
                        Re: Fastest Secure Wipe?

                        I don't see why the adaptec driver wouldn't work on a Linux 64-bit machine. I'll have to try it; unfortunately none of my 64-bit machines have an actual SCSI HA though I don't see why it wouldn't work. Alas I do not have large SCSI disks, that's why I don't use them on my 64-bit machines (largest SCSI disk I have is 73GB.)

                        I think most Linux may omit SCSI because of the problem evident on my 32-bit SCSI machine: the detect phase of SCSI is hideous for whatever reason; it takes a long time to do a bus scan that severely slows down boot if even if there's no disks attached.

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                          #13
                          Re: Fastest Secure Wipe?

                          I've still got some 147 & 300gb 10k & 15k SCSI drives around. I also have a bunch of 73gb and smaller. Big stack of 9.1gb. I usually use them in retro builds.....those are systems where scsi really shined performance-wise versus old slow ATA33/66/100/133. Especially the 9.1gb drives, can install OS and all programs/games, and not even use half the drive.
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                            #14
                            Re: Fastest Secure Wipe?

                            No question those U320 were fast compared to ATA100, alas modern SATA and especially SSDs makes my SCSI disks cry unfair.

                            I have a 18G 15K disk, 36G 10K disks, and the 73G 7200 disks (all SCA). The 73G's are RAID1 in a not-amd64 64-bit rack mount machine, so re-purposing those is not on my radar as it would leave this machine without disks.

                            I still have a whole bunch of SCSI PCI HAs - Adaptec, Initio, Symbios/NCR. Not enough disks, cables/adapters (SCA/UW?), and terminators (UW? U2W? SE? LVD?) however.

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                              #15
                              Re: Fastest Secure Wipe?

                              it's not the speed, it's the build quality.

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                                #16
                                Re: Fastest Secure Wipe?

                                Considering the disks are already very old, I don't think they will necessarily outlast a new disk. I've had a few fail already...need to locate a cheap/free 36GB U2W SCA disk to replace from a RAID array...

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                                  #17
                                  Re: Fastest Secure Wipe?

                                  Originally posted by shovenose View Post
                                  I'm planning on selling about half a dozen extra USB 3.0 hard drives on Craigslist. If I do a non-quick format in Windows 10 is that good enough? Or some other solution?
                                  No. You're best bet is to grab a bootable CD for any of the UN*X distributions (*BSD, Linux, Slowaris, etc.) and get to a (root!) shell prompt. I'd recommend a Clonezilla disk as CZ is worthwhile having on-hand, regardless.

                                  Then:

                                  dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/PUTDISKDESIGNATIONHERE bs=1024k

                                  This will make one pass over the medium writing zeroes, everywhere.

                                  Note that this will not do what you want for determined prying eyes if you are using solidstate storage (FLASH, SSD, etc.) as the internal controller is constantly reshuffling physical "sectors" around so the sectors that actually have your data may not be accessible/overwritten by the operation.

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                                    #18
                                    Re: Fastest Secure Wipe?

                                    CCleaner has a entire drive secure wipe function, a 3 pass over write should do the trick.

                                    https://www.piriform.com/docs/cclean...ree-disk-space

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                                      #19
                                      Re: Fastest Secure Wipe?

                                      Originally posted by jondoe View Post
                                      CCleaner has a entire drive secure wipe function, a 3 pass over write should do the trick.
                                      Three passes just takes three times longer. If you are actually writing to the medium (and its not a solid state drive with over-provisioning concerns), a single write will suffice.

                                      But, make sure you are writing to the whole drive not some portion (e.g., partition) of it! And, that the write doesn't throw any errors (which could indicate some portion of the medium was not written).

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                                        #20
                                        Re: Fastest Secure Wipe?

                                        There pass should be DoD 5220.22-M standard.

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