this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
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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?

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago (3 children)

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I’d recommend /dev/urandom instead of /dev/zero

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Use shred , it will automate multiple random passes, and finish with a zero pass.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Completely unnecessary. Overwriting the whole drive with zeros completely stops anyone from being able to recover anything

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

It won't stop "anyone", I've been lead to believe there are ways even after a single pass, to recover data. if I had anything to hide, I would use a physical destruction method, nothing else

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

If you're that paranoid about it, then just physically destroy the drive.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

I work for an it department who resells their old stock online, we scrub the disks before sales, physical destruction is not possible.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

That's the companies decision and they should understand the risks.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 day ago

This is a miss understanding. Deleting it doesn't actually delete the data, just the meta data. Overwrite it and it's gone forever

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Yeh, you're right

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago

This is what I was gonna say