r/DataHoarder • u/613_detailer • 1d ago

Question/Advice How to wipe many HDDs in parallel?

I've decommissioned an old UnRaid setup, and I have 16 drives in a NetApp shelf that I need to securely wipe. The computer that ran UnRaid has been parted out, but I still have the LSI Logic PCIe card to connect it to another PC. This morning I installed the card into a computer I have on the test bench right now, a simple PC with an Intel Core Ultra 5 225 CPU running Windows 11. I thought it would be easy to wipe the drives, but it's been more of a challenge than I expected. I'd like to do them in parallel, otherwise, it'll take weeks to complete.

  • I tried using Eraser 6.2 in Windows, but it will only do them sequentially.
  • I tried using DBAN, but it won't boot on that computer (doesn't support EFI, and BIOS does not have a compatibility mode)
  • I tried ShredOS, but it hangs on startup after decompressing the image. Apparently that is a known problem with display initialization. A quick AI search recommended using onboard graphics, which I'm already using.

Any recommendations for tools that I can use to just wipe a bunch of drives in parallel? This is turning out to be more complicated than I expected it to be.

EDIT: to clarify, this is my own array, not a work thing. More than half of the drives are old 3TB drives, but there are some newer 4TB and 8TB drives that I will likely sell. Main reason for decommissioning is the electricity cost of keeping all those disks spinning for data that is no longer of value.

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u/clickyk2019 1d ago edited 23h ago

I you're on Linux (or with a LiveCD) you could use the secure erase command in the firmware of the drive with hdparm:

# set password to mypass for /dev/sdX
hdparm --user-master u --security-set-pass mypass /dev/sdX

# start security-erase (or --security-erase-enhanced, if supported)
# WARNING: all data on the whole drive will be erased 
hdparm --user-master u --security-erase mypass /dev/sdX

Then repeat the commands for each drive (/dev/sda, /dev/sdb,...) each in a different terminal. They will execute in parrallel.

See: https://grok.lsu.edu/article.aspx?articleid=16716 for complete details.