All,
Has anyone experimented with hdparm to have a ATA drive wipe itself of
all its data?
ie. I just noticed the hdparm parameter:
--security-erase PWD
Erase (locked) drive, using password PWD (DANGEROUS).
Password is given as an ASCII string and is
padded with NULs to reach 32 bytes. The applicable
drive password is selected with the --user-master
switch. THIS FEATURE IS EXPERIMENTAL AND NOT WELL
TESTED. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.
I do a lot of disk wiping. ie. Anytime we buy a drive, reuse a drive
or get rid of one we do a dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdx bs=4k type of
thing to ensure the previous data is gone.
I've found I can only do 2 or 3 of those simultaneously on my test
box. Using the drive to wipe itself should allow a larger number with
no slow down of the process per drive. (We tend to buy drives 20 at a
time, so we tend to wipe them 20 at a time.)
FYI: I just read that using the security-erase feature of the drive
meets a US government wiping standard. See the whitepaper at
http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/hughes/DataSanitizationTutorial.pdf
Thanks
Greg
--
Greg Freemyer
The Norcross Group
Forensics for the 21st Century
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