I have a bunch of hard disks that have come to the end of their useful life, I was thinking about physically destroying them, but that seems like a lot of work.

https://github.com/martijnvanbrummelen/nwipe

Nwipe and shreados are very popular. What are your thoughts on the effectiveness of nwipe?

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
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    4 months ago

    Seems perfectly alright. I think for HDDs, consensus is you overwrite everything and you’re fine. If you want to make absolutely sure you can do multiple passes, like 2 or 3 with different (random) data should suffice. There are a lot of myths around though, concerning wiping data.

    I generally use the common, established linux utilities: ‘wipe’ or ‘shred’ or just ‘dd’ on the whole device. The Arch Wiki has a long article on Securely wipe disk. I guess nwipe is fine, too.

    Terms and conditions apply if you’re using flash memory or SSDs. Overwriting them is not 100% effective. But for plain harddisks it is.

  • UFO@programming.dev
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    4 months ago

    I use a metal drill right through the platers. They shatter. Nobody cares about my dumb shit to recover that. Takes about 30 seconds per drive.

  • Reddfugee42@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    It literally takes longer to software wipe than to drill a hole as other commenters have mentioned.

    Edit: make sure it’s through the platters, not just the circuit board end

  • Zerophnx@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    We use nwipe at the office and are happy with it. It has a dod preset or you can stick with prng. We usually use prng and zeros.

    If you have a ton of drives I think shredos can be automated with boot parameters. Could save a lot of time and/or let you scale wiping better