RMAing a HDD - Wipe the drive?

ipeefreely

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Apr 30, 2012
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I had a couple of my Seagate 3TB drives fail on my RIAD 6 array on my Areca 1882ix-16 over the past couple of months. They have a bunch of bad sectors and fail the short DST test on Seagate tools.

I bought the 3 year In-Store Product Replacement for them because they only had a one year warranty from Seagate.

They show up in RAW format on windows 7 plug into a sata port.

I'm wondering if someone could pull any info off them (I would assume they would need a Areca card as a starting point...)?

Should I write zeros to the drive to be sure?

Thanks! :D
 
At work where I have sent back 75+ drives I usually run badblocks till the drive totally fails. But that is mostly to verify that the drive is bad and to get a code (although neither Seagate no WDC requires this) for the RMA. I do expect that the company that handles the RMAs to erase the disks (without looking at them) before giving them to someone else.
 
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I don't see how anyone could (practically) retrieve the information off of those drives. They would be missing FAR too much data due to the stripping to get anything much useful. I suppose there would be blocks of useable data (since it might 64K or 128K of data). But it surely is not as simple as just looking at the drive and seeing clear file names.
 
I wouldn't worry either due to the RAID6, however if you had very sensitive data, in text, and since the drives look like they can still be accessed, then yes you could overwrite them (not with zeros but rather random schemes). I expect the company processing the drives to plug them, run a diagnostic, and if a malfunction is found, to trash them.
 
What if it was a 2 drive RAID0? Would data be easy to retrieve?
 
If the data is sensitive enough to worry about it being exploited during the RMA process, then you shred the drive instead. End of story.
 
If you're important enough, or someone curious enough, I'm sure something could be done to pull some info off the drive with enough effort, especially if you've not wiped anything. There are companies and government agencies who specialize in this type of work.

However - usually you're just not that important, and no one can be bothered.

Just wipe it if you're still concerned.
 
One pass of zeros will be more than anyone can undue.

Can use a linux bootable (live) cd and us dd to do it.
 
OP. Ever use these drives as single drives? Anything on them before you stripped them that was not over written by the raid can be retrieved.
 
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