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

[Brian O'Neill]

On 2/7/2013 4:35 PM, John P. Rouillard wrote:
>
> 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.

Yeah, we tried JBOD'ing the disks, and it didn't work for some reason. 
There are a variety of HP and Dell controllers. And we weren't terribly 
concerned with the reserved space, just the filesystem data.