On Tue, Dec 04, 2012 at 05:56:03PM +0000, Amit wrote: > Ulrich Windl <Ulrich.Windl@...> writes: > > > > > Overwriting from start to end with random data should do, also. I > > don't know anything about "secure erase"... > > > > Hello, > > Thanks for the reply. Yes, overwriting with random data should work. > Secure Erase is a feature in most drives that basically does the same as > overwriting data. However, a special ATA/SCSI command is defined for > this. An estimated time can also be obtained.
[Note: speaking as a user] Invoking ATA-level secure erase over iSCSI does not really make sense. Looking the docs, this command should affect a device, and only an entire device. As such, the entire feature would be useful _only_ when a target exports a full block device (ie. hard drive). Just think of what would happen to a hard drive which has multiple partitions and each of those is then exported as individual iSCSI volumes. There's no guarantee that all of the volumes are used by the same client instance - if any one of them could issue the secure erase command, ALL the partitions would be lost. And it gets better. What if a single exported volume was actually a section of LVM? Now the command could potentially span multiple physical devices. Come to think of it, the volume could also be a disk image... So it really doesn't make any sense. iSCSI is after all a transport mechanism, not a remote-physical-block-device mechanism. (Remote block device, yes. Just not necessarily remote physical block device.) -- Mika Boström Individualisti, eksistentialisti, www.iki.fi/bostik rationalisti ja mulkvisti GPG: 0x2AED22CC; 6FC9 8375 31B7 3BA2 B5DC 484E F19F 8AD6 2AED 22CC -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "open-iscsi" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/open-iscsi?hl=en.
