[clug] OT: newbie RAID question

[Daniel Pittman]

Carlo Hamalainen <carlo.hamalainen at gmail.com> writes:
> On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 11:58 AM, Robert Cohen <robertc99 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Since your asking on a linux list. Presumably your running linux on the
>> server.
>
> Unfortunately it's running Windows Server 2003.

Any hardware and a LiveCD does a commendable job. :)

>> At least in theory you don't need advanced commands to scrub a disk.
>> As long as you can get access to it as a device, dd if=/dev/zero will work
>> just fine.
>
> Yep, in the past I have used a utility like 'shred' on Linux.

For what it is worth (and to my surprise when I learned it), the government
standard for magnetic media sanitation at *any* level (§6.2.92, ISM Sept 2009)
is only this:

If your media is post-2001 or greater than 15GB in size you need to make a
single pass overwrite with an arbitrary pattern, followed by read-back
verification.

That would be most easily achieved using the 'badblocks' tool that ships with
your distribution; I advise the options:

  # badblocks -c 4096 -s -t random -v -w /path/to/my/block/device

The most important part is '-c 4096', which uses a larger write size and can
cut the overwrite and read-back times enormously on modern devices.

Regards,
        Daniel

No, seriously, that actually covers "top secret" classified material.
-- 
✣ Daniel Pittman            ✉ daniel at rimspace.net            ☎ +61 401 155 707
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