Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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RMAing a large HDD that has pirated movies/games on it, is it necessary to completely zero the drive? (alien.top)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The manufacturer requires that the faulty HDD be sent back. It's 18 TB, so ShredOS estimates 100 hours to completely wipe the drive. I really would rather not go through that. Does anyone else have experience with this?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

You should use ATA Secure Erase, it is much faster then most if not all the other methods. It generally works better on failing drives in my experience as well.

There are various ways to do it depending on your system/OS. Some BIOS have an ATA Secure Erase option built into them. (Parted Magic has a nice GUI, hdparm, etc.)

It has been a while since I used it on a super large drive, but I am guessing your 18TB will take a few hours.

Just make sure to select the correct drive (or have it be the only drive in the system preferable) as there is no recovery if you choose the wrong drive.