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

On 10/10/2024 8:46 AM, Michael Sierchio wrote:
>
> 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. ;-)

We do both for disks.  We do a dd if=/dev/urandom first. Regardless if 
that fails/passes, we then physically destroy the disk.  The idea being 
if for some reason step 2 is missed, low effort prying eyes will not 
find anything.    Depends on your situation and sensitivity of the data.

     ---Mike