Question How to remove RAID from some drive I found at Goodwill ?

[KLund1]

Hi,
I found to bare 2TB WD Black drives at a local Goodwill store.
The drive work good.
But when I hot plug one at a time into my system, each drive shows as 2 drives. I can see that they are set up as Intel RAID 1.
Win11 Disk Management can't delete the RAID. EraseUS Partition Master sees the same as Win11, but also can't delete the RAID.
Any suggestions to completely wipe these drives?
Thanks

 

[evermorex76]

How to Diskpart Erase/Clean a Drive Through the Command Prompt | Seagate US

This article explains the Microsoft Diskpart Erase utility. The command that erases the drive during this process is "Clean". In this article "Clean" and erase are used interchangeably. Cleaning or erasing a storage device removes all data and partitions from the drive.

www.seagate.com

Be very very certain you have selected the correct disk.

The reason they show up as "two" is because Intel's RAID is basically just Windows software RAID, so Windows Disk Management can see that there was a RAID configuration with two drives. It shows the drive you have plugged in and also lists the "missing" drive from the array so that you're aware you have a problem. If you plugged them both in at the same time Windows would actually let you read and write to the drives, and possibly see any data that somebody left on them. (If it was RAID0 both drives need to be plugged in to access it. If it was RAID1 then you can just read it with one drive.) Whoever owned them previously didn't properly sanitize them before giving them to Goodwill.

Partition Master or AOMEI Partition Assistant should still have the option to "wipe" the drives which would write all zeroes, or perhaps do a "quick wipe" that doesn't actually write all that data, which would remove the RAID configuration, but I've never actually tried to do it with those.

Your motherboard BIOS may also have an option to perform a Secure Erase on the drives, depending on the model of the board and drives, but obviously you have to shut down as well as have them plugged into the motherboard directly. Western Digital also has a bootable erasure tool you can put on a flash drive, which makes it absolutely certain the data can't be read. But obviously just using diskpart from the link works perfectly fine for your purposes.

I don't know what you mean by "work good" if you haven't actually been able to use them. You should check the health of the drives using monitoring and benchmark tools before trusting them with important data. I don't think I'd ever be comfortable with bare SSDs that ended up at Goodwill.

 

[KLund1]

Thanks for the helpful reply.
'work good' meant that the drives spun up and were recognized by win11. I was able to reformat whatever was in the RAID single drive, virtual drives. Not sure what to call individual 'drives' in a single physical drive that are not partitions.
I probably should not have done that. I did not know any better. But it is done.
I tried 'wipe' with eraseUS and it just wiped the individual 'drives' on the physical drive. I'll give AOMEI a try and report back. I assume your reference to 'Partition Master' was the eraseUS? If not please post a link to what you suggested.
Again Thanks

 

[evermorex76]

Yes I was just referring to EaseUS (not EraseUS) PM since you'd mentioned it. You can refer to "disks" rather than drives, or just say physical drives since they're not all actual disks now, but the only thing you could reformat is a partition. A partition is a "drive" as far as the OS is concerned. PM and PA will allow you to wipe either a partition (drive letter) or the entire physical disk/drive. Just right click on the Disk1 for example and you'll see the option. Right-clicking on the partition will only give the option to wipe the partition. (Different layout options may change where menus appear.)

The "wipe" option is actually less preferred when it only gives you "write zeroes" or "fill zeroes" as the quick option or possibly a "secure wipe" option which performs multiple overwrites with random data. On a mechanical hard drive it's just time-consuming, but on an SSD it applies additional wear to the cells which have a limited number of writes, and due to the way an SSD works it may not actually wipe all the data (if security were a real concern).

The diskpart "clean" command takes only a few moments to run, like 30 seconds, maybe a minute. It's been a long time since I used it on a mechanical drive.

You should definitely run a tool like Crystal DiskInfo or other that can read SMART data to check whether those drives have had a severely high number of power-on hours, check for reallocated sectors or other errors, etc. You have no idea how those drives have been handled or what they were doing before being donated, and it's not like Goodwill is using proper handling procedures or testing them before sale. Run a full SMART diagnostic test on them, or another testing tool like Victoria.