I'm just finishing up the design of a "disk maintenance station" to process drives in large batches (high throughputs).
Among other things, it can be used to "sanitize" drives to ensure sensitive information doesn't leak forward. I process 60 drives at a time (hot-swap allowing completed/failed drives to be removed from the fixture without impacting the progress of the other drives). This gets the effective "time per drive" down to just a few minutes -- instead of an hour or more (for TB drives)
[Presently, I only do SATA/SAS drives as there is little demand to process SCSI, FC-AL, etc. -- they just go directly to the shredder]
In addition to (and to some extent, PRIOR to) overwriting the entire volume, I perform some checks (queries) to see if the drive can be completely overwritten and mark it for physical destruction if the process fails to complete as intended.
In most cases, this is also the only actual "test" of the drive's functionality; I monitor write failures, write rate, retries, etc. and mark the drive as failed if these aren't as expected.
[I can also exhaustively test drives -- but usually don't need/want to do this unless the drive is REALLY "precious"!]
The goal, here, is that when a disk has completed this process, I can print a label (w/QR code), slap it on the drive and automatically log it into "inventory".
But, different disk technologies (I don't do SSDs) and manufacturers support different hooks so I can't (won't!) optimize my tests to fully exploit the information that I might be able to coerce from the drive through out-of-band methods.
Are there any other things (wrt wiping) that I might want to sense/flag to:
Among other things, it can be used to "sanitize" drives to ensure sensitive information doesn't leak forward. I process 60 drives at a time (hot-swap allowing completed/failed drives to be removed from the fixture without impacting the progress of the other drives). This gets the effective "time per drive" down to just a few minutes -- instead of an hour or more (for TB drives)
[Presently, I only do SATA/SAS drives as there is little demand to process SCSI, FC-AL, etc. -- they just go directly to the shredder]
In addition to (and to some extent, PRIOR to) overwriting the entire volume, I perform some checks (queries) to see if the drive can be completely overwritten and mark it for physical destruction if the process fails to complete as intended.
In most cases, this is also the only actual "test" of the drive's functionality; I monitor write failures, write rate, retries, etc. and mark the drive as failed if these aren't as expected.
[I can also exhaustively test drives -- but usually don't need/want to do this unless the drive is REALLY "precious"!]
The goal, here, is that when a disk has completed this process, I can print a label (w/QR code), slap it on the drive and automatically log it into "inventory".
But, different disk technologies (I don't do SSDs) and manufacturers support different hooks so I can't (won't!) optimize my tests to fully exploit the information that I might be able to coerce from the drive through out-of-band methods.
Are there any other things (wrt wiping) that I might want to sense/flag to:
- avoid wiping a drive that is likely not going to complete successfully
- avoid wiping a drive that is likely to "throw fits"
- complete wiping but end up with a drive that will be unreliable
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