A Qnap NAS has a drive with some bad sectors, I want to RMA it, but before just want to figure out how to prepare a drive? It’s part of a raid 5 setup of 4 drives unencrypted. So I want to remove it and wipe it. Got a Linux machine I can use, but never done this before.

What are common Linux tools to do that sensibly?

  • Gayhitler@lemmy.ml
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    4 hours ago

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/(your drive)

    You can do status=progress if you want like someone else posted and if you pick a block size go with either the physical block size reported by the disk in smartcontrol or some multiple of it that coincides with a big even division of your controllers memory. The drives physical block size will be “easy” for the drive, bigger blocks are faster.

    People saying physical destruction are operating in a different world than you and people saying urandom or shred are operating off old (>30 years) information. The same technology that makes ssds unrecoverable black boxes was originally developed and deployed in spinning drives to eek out speed gains because the disk itself can be expected to know better than the operating system where to put shit and makes techniques (which were postulated but never actually implemented successfully in the wild) to recover overwritten data infeasible.

    Alternately just reformat it and don’t worry. No one doing drive rmas cares about your data. They’re already on the razors edge with feedback and customer trust, you think they’re gonna burn their above board bread and butter to run a harvesting operation for a few bucks on the side? That’s usually the purview of your local pc repair shop…