[BBLISA] Looking for disk destruction in metro Boston/Manchester NH area.

[John P. Rouillard]

In message <51140666.3050004 at oinc.net>,
"Brian O'Neill" writes:
>On 2/7/2013 2:04 PM, John P. Rouillard wrote:
>> Our normal decomissioning (before releasing to employees or sending it
>> out for recyling) is to run a single cycle dban with a zero pass for
>> normal drives. For drives with sensitive (PII or contractually
>> obligated data) we return the drives to the supplier or do a more
>> extensive wipe of the data using multiple methods.
>
>Ironically I'm at a datacenter all day today, wiping systems. 
>Unfortunately DBAN failed to work on a number of systems (they all have 
>hardware RAID), so we're using live CDs and a perl script I whipped up 
>that writes pseudo-random data directly to the drives.

We use 3ware, areca and LSI hardware raid. The trick with those is to
turn the disks into jbods. IIRC on 3ware, you destroy the raid, set
the controler to export jbods and type J or j to turn your disks into
jbod disks.  On LSI you do it by creating a raid 0 consisting of a
single disk. Don't know how we do it on areca's.

But once you have jbod'ed them you can see all the disks in the array
and dban has worked fine. The nice part is that you get to wipe all of
the disks in parallel which speeds up the wipe process. Also some raid
controllers trim the disks to a size slightly smaller than the actual
drive size (so you can mix and match drives with the same nominal size
but slightly different real sizes). Some raids use that extra space
for metadata. By jbodding you get to clean that off as well.

But cleaning disks where you can't get direct access to them is a
problem. (e.g. SSD's may still have actual data in "deleted" locations
that you can't get to, not sure if an ATA erase command cleans those.)
Hence the need for drive destruction by boiling in acid, roasting etc.

---
				-- rouilj
John Rouillard
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My employers don't acknowledge my existence much less my opinions.