[SOLVED] Recommend a external hard drive docking station to wipe drives

[software_d00d]

I have decommissioned a Western Digital MyCloud EX4 and I need to wipe the 4 drives that lived in the NAS.

I have a Sabrent SATA to USB connector and tried to wipe the drives from Ubuntu, but when viewing the drives with gdisk -l and lsusb, I could see a ton of errors, for some reason.

I was wondering if I were to purchase an external hard drive docking station, say a Sabrenet USB 3.0 to SATA Dual Bay. Would I be able to wipe these drives from Ubuntu with any issues?

thanks

 

[USAFRet]

What is the "SATA to USB connector " you currently have?

I have this dock, works just fine.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0099TX7O4

 

[hotaru.hino]

I have a Sabrent SATA to USB connector and tried to wipe the drives from Ubuntu, but when viewing the drives with gdisk -l and lsusb, I could see a ton of errors, for some reason.

If it doesn't have auxiliary power, that's why. USB doesn't provide enough power to reliably run anything bigger than a 2.5" drive.

 

[software_d00d]

What is the "SATA to USB connector " you currently have?

I have this dock, works just fine.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0099TX7O4

I have Sabrent USB 3.0 to SSD / 2.5-Inch SATA I/II/III Hard Drive Adapter (see below).

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B011M8YACM/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

[software_d00d]

If it doesn't have auxiliary power, that's why. USB doesn't provide enough power to reliably run anything bigger than a 2.5" drive.

Okay, good to know.

The drives are 3.5 SATA Drives, 2.0 TB for storage.

 

[mdd1963]

Were the drives in question configured in RAID 5? Individually, any data from any combination of less than 3 of them are but useless fragments of assorted bytes.

You could certainly hook them up one at a time (or all, with enough SATA ports/power cables) with a SATA data and SATA power cable, and clear them with a single pass with a bootable DBAN configured USB flash drive. (Disconnect any/all of your actual drives during this process!)

 

[USAFRet]

I have Sabrent USB 3.0 to SSD / 2.5-Inch SATA I/II/III Hard Drive Adapter (see below).

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B011M8YACM/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

That will never ever work for a 3.5" drive.
Those drives require 5v and 12v. The USB port can only supply the 5v.

 

[mdd1963]

If an adapter says 2.5" USB HDD/SSD, it does not have enough power to work with 3.5" drives...

 

[software_d00d]

Were the drives in question configured in RAID 5? Individually, any data from any combination of less than 3 of them are but useless fragments of assorted bytes.

You could certainly hook them up one at a time (or all, with enough SATA ports/power cables) with a SATA data and SATA power cable, and clear them with a single pass with a bootable DBAN configured USB flash drive. (Disconnect any/all of your actual drives during this process!)

Correct, had 4 drives in a RAID 5 configuration.

I was going to use the command shred against the drives, 3 passes to be sure. There is no hurry.

 

[mdd1963]

3 passes hurts nothing (aside from a little more wear on drives with the 10-16 hours of constant writes), especially if disposing of said drives...

 

[software_d00d]

3 passes hurts nothing (aside from a little more wear on drives with the 10-16 hours of constant writes), especially if disposing of said drives...

Okay then, how many passes do you recommend?