Securely wiping multiple SAS drives using a server

[NirGreenSpring]

Hi,

I have to securely wipe around 300 SAS drives to the point of no data being recoverable (and provide documentation), I have a server and another thing which plugs into the server which holds a further 14 SAS drives and could set up more when I have it up and running. What do I need to do in order to just stick these drives into the server/s and wipe them all simultaneously?

I have tried DBAN with no success.

Thanks

 

[mcnumpty23]

they going to be re used or disposed of

if not going to be re used physical destruction would be my option

 

[NirGreenSpring]

they going to be re used or disposed of

if not going to be re used physical destruction would be my option

If only that was the case. They're going to be re-used.

 

[Rookie_MIB]

I would say that if you can boot a live CD of a unix based system, you could (for each drive), execute the command as root:

sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX bs=4096 &

The if=/dev/urandom specifies the input file source and will write random data to every block, you could replace it with /dev/zero which will write all zeros. The of=/dev/sdX - the X will be replaced with the drive letter in the system (as in sda, sdb, sdc etc). bs is simply the block size to write, and the '&' character is IMPORTANT. That indicates that the system will execute the command and drop it into the background. This allows you to do as many drives as you have connected simultaneously instead of waiting for it to finish and then do the next one. The drive is finished when the system outputs a line with 'no space left on drive'.

So - if you have 10 hotswap slots on a server, you could zero or random 10 drives at a time. This is generally a pretty accepted way to zero the drives. If you wanted to be more secure, you could write with zeros, then random, then zeros again.

You could also (if you're running a real unix system instead of a live CD) write a script for it which would automate it. This would do three drives (assuming sda is your boot drive, sdb-d are the other drives):

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=4096 &
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=4096 &
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdd bs=4096 &

Name is as 'wipedrive.sh' then execute it as root:

sudo sh wipedrive.sh &

After they're done, swap the drives out, replace them with the next batch, run it again until you have all the drives done.

 

[mcnumpty23]

normally a company big enough to have 300 drives needing wiped would send them out to a company that specialises in that

obviously dont know why you have been given the task so no doubt there will be a reason why you are trying to do it we are unaware of

but will still be time consuming given the amount of drives and depending on their size and how many over writes they want done to them to be classed as

securely wiped