Format server SAS drives to reuse in another server?

[SHADOWSTRIKE1]

Hey guys. So we have been retiring some of our old servers (HP DL380 G5), and we would like to format the harddrives so that they can be reused in other servers and our SAN that have some deteriorating drives in various RAIDs.

What is the best/easiest way of going about this? I have a "dummy server" set up specifically to reformat different size disk drives. I have tried going into HP Array Configuration Utility, and created a new array for some "unallocated drives" and have then created logical disks, and then performed a Quick Format in Disk Manger.

Would that do the trick? Preferably, I would like to remove all data from the drives, as well as all RAID configuration on them. Basically restore them to "like new" status so they can be put in our other servers.

The server I am using is running Windows Server 2008 R2. Is there some type of software that can easily do this? Or was I on the right track?

I was recently hired to this company as a network technician, and the last thing I want to do is put a used drive in our SAN and have it try to copy over old data to the other disks or something.

 

[JaredDM]

Creating a new array and quick formatting with the drives will not provide immediate access to any old data. However it's also not a "secure" way of sanitizing the drives as data recovery software could easily scan for data in the unused sectors. If it's all from within the same company, I'd say just go for it using your old plan. However if the data belongs to another company or individual you probably don't want to take the risk that someone could potentially recover some of the old data one day. For example, if the new array was to fail and needed pro data recovery, they'd be recovering both old and new data.

What you might consider is either wiping the drives individually (assuming you have a non RAID SAS controller card to do it) using a program like Active KillDisk. Or you could just wipe the unused space on the new array after you create it using a program such as Eraser (http://eraser.heidi.ie/). In either event a simple zero fill is all you'd need to guarantee recovery is impossible. There's no point in multiple pass wiping at all.

 

[SHADOWSTRIKE1]

Yes it's all in the same company. I just wanted to ensure that I wouldn't cause problems by putting an old used HDD from a retiring server into our SAN or something. I was fearful of putting in the HDD and it trying to replicate data to the already present drives or attempting to take one of the Global Spares to do so. The best option I could think of to prevent this was to completely wipe all data and RAID info from the drives.

Unfortunately I do not have any non RAID SAS controllers. I'm going to give the Eraser program a shot and see how it goes. So far I have gone and created an individual array for each drive that is to be wiped. From there, I created a logical drive from each array's single disk in RAID 0. Should I initialize disks in Disk Management once I have created the logical drives? Or leave them uninitialized?

 

[JaredDM]

No, you shouldn't. Initializing them will create a new partition table on each drive. However in a RAID setup you'll only be creating one partition table and allocating the size of the entire array. Wipe them, create the array, then initialize the array after it's assembled.