Usually my process is very… hammer and drill related - but I have a family member who is interested in taking my latest batch of hard drives after I upgraded.

What are the best (linux) tools for the process? I’d like to run some tests to make sure they’re good first and also do a full zero out of any data. (Used to be a raid if that matters)

Edit: Thanks all, process is officially started, will probably run for quite a while. Appreciate the advice!

  • thenumbersmason@yiffit.netEnglish
    9·
    11 months ago

    dd works fine, you’d use it something like this

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/[the drive] status=progress conv=fsync bs=4M

    if: input file

    of: output file

    status=progress: shows progress

    conv=fsync: basically does the equivalent of running “sync” after the command, makes sure all the kernel buffers have actually written out and are on the device. This causes the command to “hang” near the end depending on how much RAM is installed on the computer. It’s not actually hanging it’s just finishing writing out the data that’s still cached in RAM. This can take a while depending on drive speed and quantity of system RAM.

    bs=4M sets the block size to something high enough you’re not CPU bottlenecked. Not particularly important exactly what the value is, 4M is a good sane default for most things including this full disk operation.

    edit: one pass of zeros is enough to protect against all trivial data recovery techniques. If your threat model includes three letter agencies the hammer and drill bit technique is 👍

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techOPEnglish
      3·
      11 months ago

      Thanks! I’ve used dd for things like recovering/cloning drives but it makes complete sense I can wipe it too. Thanks for the progress trick too, it was always just a blank cursor to me when I ran it before!