I have a stack of SATA hard drives that I need to erase.

I have a USB drive dock, a box that a drive can be set into that connects to my computer via USB-3.

I am using DD to write zeros to the raw device, in this case, /dev/sdf.

No matter the actual size of the drive dd stops at about 3 to 7 gb. These are 300 gb to 3 TB drives.

I am not mounting the drives, but I do ensure they are visible to the system with lsblk. To change drives I turn off the dock. The drive then disappears from lsblk. When I insert a different drive and turn the dock back on again /dev/sdf re-appears.

Are all my drives bad? If they are I will need to have them “professionally” destroyed at about $25 a drive.

  • toikpi
    1·
    1 year ago

    I would suspect the cabling and/or the dock before all your drives.

    Writing zeros to hard disk does not securely delete the contents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutmann_method

    A further problem with writing zeros to the contents to /dev/sdf/ is that contents of any relocated sectors will not be over-written. It might be possible to recover data from those bad sectors.

    If you can get the dock working, look at using hpparm to do SATA secure delete? It has flags to support this. https://www.putorius.net/securely-erase-a-sata-hard-drive-hdparm-linux.html You could then use hpparm to set an unique, LONG, random password on each drive.