Re: How to zero a failing disk drive before disposal?

On Thu, Oct 10, 2024 at 7:58 AM Ronald F. Guilmette <rfg@tristatelogic.com>
wrote:

> I have a pretty ancient 4TB spinning rust drive (WD4001FAEX) that is
> unambiguously at
> death's door:
>


> Any suggestions?  If worse comes to worse I guess I will end up writing my
> own tiny
> little C program to just write 4KB blocks to a designated output file
> while ignoring
> all output errors, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel if somebody else
> already
> created something I can use in this context.


There is no method of writing to a disk that can reliably delete or obscure
all data – modern disk drives silently remap sectors, making them
unavailable to the host for writes.  If the data on the drive is
particularly sensitive, physical destruction of the media is the best
approach.  The DOD method is crush, then burn. ;-)

– M