Seatools killed 2 drives today

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jfreund

[H]ard|Gawd
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I copied my old 8TB external drive and my newer 16 TB external drive to a 26TB. Tried to use Seatools to erase them both, and it bricked them both instead. Sector 0 read failure.

Fuck Seagate.
 
Sorry for your loss man, that is brutal.

I fucking hate that brand with a passion, funnily enough though.. I lost more Raptors then I lost Seagates.

Fuck Raptors too lol. ADFD in particular.

I kept the clicky one with the window, but they all clicked in the end lol.

I *think* my Rampage III Formula had a firmware bug or something.. because I lost 6 or 7 drives and SSDs with that thing over the course of nearly a decade. I was running an ES chip the entire time.. maybe had something to do with it.. not sure.. I sold the board/CPU and some ram for it so maybe I will never really know.. fuck that board.
 
freeagentt said:
Sorry for your loss man, that is brutal.

I fucking hate that brand with a passion, funnily enough though.. I lost more Raptors then I lost Seagates.

Fuck Raptors too lol. ADFD in particular.

I kept the clicky one with the window, but they all clicked in the end lol.

I *think* my Rampage III Formula had a firmware bug or something.. because I lost 6 or 7 drives and SSDs with that thing over the course of nearly a decade. I was running an ES chip the entire time.. maybe had something to do with it.. not sure.. I sold the board/CPU and some ram for it so maybe I will never really know.. fuck that board.
Click to expand...
Must be the board, ran 4 raptors and at 80K hours not a peep ever, in fact super quiet and ran cool

As for seatools, just use windows to raw it, if you want secure erase to sell acronis can do that and other tools

I have not used seatools in over 10 year, about the time I no longer was using seagates
 
Killdisk for Windows. Free. Just run the zero wipe. You can either run it all the way to the end for a secure erase or just let it run for a few seconds and it'll put the drive back to raw ready for a new install or file system, just not securely erased. Quick, easy, no drama.
 
Advil said:
Killdisk for Windows. Free. Just run the zero wipe. You can either run it all the way to the end for a secure erase or just let it run for a few seconds and it'll put the drive back to raw ready for a new install or file system, just not securely erased. Quick, easy, no drama.
Click to expand...
Windows servers suck, linux servers are the tits and you just do sudo shred -n 1 -v /dev/sdX or sudo shred -n 1 -v /dev/mdX or whatever suffix is applicable to you. If you don't need to use it for anything after thermite is also very good.
 
Wade88 said:
Windows servers suck, linux servers are the tits and you just do sudo shred -n 1 -v /dev/sdX or sudo shred -n 1 -v /dev/mdX or whatever suffix is applicable to you. If you don't need to use it for anything after thermite is also very good.
Click to expand...

Why dont they just have an option that you can select the disk and click rather than type all that? Why all the typing? Just gimme an icon to click.
 
jfreund said:
I copied my old 8TB external drive and my newer 16 TB external drive to a 26TB. Tried to use Seatools to erase them both, and it bricked them both instead. Sector 0 read failure.

Fuck Seagate.
Click to expand...
did you try cleaning them with diskpart and then reinitialize?
 
daglesj said:
Why dont they just have an option that you can select the disk and click rather than type all that? Why all the typing? Just gimme an icon to click.
Click to expand...
Lazy bastards such as yourself can copy and paste.
 
applegrcoug said:
I had three hgst drives fail last week. Screw them too.
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well hgst drives are no longer so they were old.........what kind?

I have 4 hgst NAS drives which are 12 years old with almost 90K hours and they are still rock solid

All drives the past 15+ years are robust per your situation

25 years I have never had a drive fail ever.......I had maybe a couple flagged they were having problems
but they did not outright fail or brick, I just replaced them before they had the chance

I still have a working albeit slow as paint drying IMB deskstar PATA glass platter.......

don't beat them, don't cook them, turn off AAM/AMP so they don't park the heads constantly
 
daglesj said:
Nah, I just want a 21st century OS. Not a tribute to green screen PCs from the early 80's.
Click to expand...
They make distros specifically for lazy bums like yourself that are visually indistinguishable from Windows, and the FOSS GUI people don't destroy good conventions to justify their [nonexistent] paychecks. Windows itself is largely written on 32 bit stuff from the 80's and 90s.
 
Since I quit torrenting years ago, I find myself not needing that type of mass storage.

Fuck spinners in general too :)

I know tons of people still need em, but not this guy.

No offence meant..
 
If you want a GUI with Linux to reset a drive you can typically just run something like gpartd from your Linux desktop or from a handy USB stick tool like Clonezilla. Just select and delete any partitions and it generally doesn't care if it can read the partition or not. So there are 21st century options.

You can also boot stick Killdisk or run the Linux version.

I haven't needed a terminal since I dumped Windows last month.
 
ep0x73 said:
well hgst drives are no longer so they were old.........what kind?

I have 4 hgst NAS drives which are 12 years old with almost 90K hours and they are still rock solid

All drives the past 15+ years are robust per your situation

25 years I have never had a drive fail ever.......I had maybe a couple flagged they were having problems
but they did not outright fail or brick, I just replaced them before they had the chance

I still have a working albeit slow as paint drying IMB deskstar PATA glass platter.......

don't beat them, don't cook them, turn off AAM/AMP so they don't park the heads constantly
Click to expand...
10TB SAS drives.
 
freeagentt said:
Since I quit torrenting years ago, I find myself not needing that type of mass storage.

Fuck spinners in general too :)

I know tons of people still need em, but not this guy.

No offence meant..
Click to expand...
If you have the coin a 4TB SSD and they will likely keep growing of course

Yes, anybody at home that needs a 20TB spinner has a ton of porn, nothing else takes up that much room
unless you have a huge movie collection you actually want to watch again and again

spinners are fine.......just toss them in raid1 with a hot spare if you are super worried about your
vintage family photo's, game collection or music collection
 
Last edited:
jfreund said:
I copied my old 8TB external drive and my newer 16 TB external drive to a 26TB. Tried to use Seatools to erase them both, and it bricked them both instead. Sector 0 read failure.

Fuck Seagate.
Click to expand...

Ouch, that’s brutal. 😬 At least you cloned them first… I’d still try a low-level format with something other than SeaTools before totally writing them off, but yeah, Seagate not exactly inspiring confidence here.
 
ep0x73 said:
If you have the coin a 4TB SSD and they will likely keep growing of course

Yes, anybody at home that needs a 20TB spinner has a ton of porn, nothing else takes up that much room
unless you have a huge movie collection you actually want to watch again and again

spinners are fine.......just toss them in raid1 with a hot spare if you are super worried about your
vintage family photo's, game collection or music collection
Click to expand...
Or people have a blue iris server that records 24/7 and wants a month storage.
 
ep0x73 said:
If you have the coin a 4TB SSD and they will likely keep growing of course

Yes, anybody at home that needs a 20TB spinner has a ton of porn, nothing else takes up that much room
unless you have a huge movie collection you actually want to watch again and again

spinners are fine.......just toss them in raid1 with a hot spare if you are super worried about your
vintage family photo's, game collection or music collection
Click to expand...
Raid is not a backup..

Just do a 3 drive, Raid 1, hot spares are useless these days if you have direct access to said system and a waste of a drive anyways, which is on and running anyways.

Also if you are worried about them do proper backups.
 
ep0x73 said:
bitlocker is fine for your laptop if you take it out but for a home setup with a low theft rate it can also be a pain if you need the recovery key
Click to expand...
You should have the recovery key saved anyways, and the reason to do this is you encrypt the drive, then format it again and no data is accessible, faster than doing a zero to a disk several times over and less taxing on it, it is one way to make sure SSD's are "clean"
 
ep0x73 said:
bitlocker is fine for your laptop if you take it out but for a home setup with a low theft rate it can also be a pain if you need the recovery key
Click to expand...
That has nothing to do with my post. My post was about sanitizing a drive.

MrGuvernment said:
You should have the recovery key saved anyways, and the reason to do this is you encrypt the drive, then format it again and no data is accessible, faster than doing a zero to a disk several times over and less taxing on it, it is one way to make sure SSD's are "clean"
Click to expand...
Exactly.
 
MrGuvernment said:
Raid is not a backup..

Just do a 3 drive, Raid 1, hot spares are useless these days if you have direct access to said system and a waste of a drive anyways, which is on and running anyways.

Also if you are worried about them do proper backups.
Click to expand...
it certainly is a backup if you don't get a virus and stay away from porn sites and dark web
20+ years with raid 1, not a single problem, only one older drive got flagged it was going to fail, replaced, no worries

yes, I make an acronis copy on my other raid 1 pair and a external, never had to use it yet in decades
 
Shoganai said:
That has nothing to do with my post. My post was about sanitizing a drive.


Exactly.
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lots of free tools to blank a drive and erase any metadata but why? unless you plan to sell that old drive for a few bucks why go through all the effort? you really think if you throw in your trash can somebody is going to dig it out, install it and see your porn collection?

many people overthink this
 
ep0x73 said:
lots of free tools to blank a drive and erase any metadata but why? unless you plan to sell that old drive for a few bucks why go through all the effort? you really think if you throw in your trash can somebody is going to dig it out, install it and see your porn collection?

many people overthink this
Click to expand...
Effort? It's barely any effort. And no ... sanitizing a drive before selling or destroying isn't overthinking anything. You have no idea what kind of personal information can be brought back from an old drive. I'd rather the risk be zero than highly improbable.
 
ep0x73 said:
it certainly is a backup if you don't get a virus and stay away from porn sites and dark web
20+ years with raid 1, not a single problem, only one older drive got flagged it was going to fail, replaced, no worries

yes, I make an acronis copy on my other raid 1 pair and a external, never had to use it yet in decades
Click to expand...
Wrong,

Raid is not a backup, raid provides redundancy in a single system. Delete a file on that Raid 1? gone.... File gets corrupted on said Raid 1 - gone

PSU on that system dies?

Mobo fries and takes out your Raid 1....

You are doing backups as you copy data to another system. (3-2-1)

But if you have a single system and Raid or not, and said data does not exist anywhere else, that is not a backup.
 
ep0x73 said:
lots of free tools to blank a drive and erase any metadata but why? unless you plan to sell that old drive for a few bucks why go through all the effort? you really think if you throw in your trash can somebody is going to dig it out, install it and see your porn collection?

many people overthink this
Click to expand...
Install windows, enable bitlocker, reinstall windows to sell or just delete the partitions, done, data not accessible or recoverable, takes 20 mins.
 
MrGuvernment said:
Wrong,

Raid is not a backup, raid provides redundancy in a single system. Delete a file on that Raid 1? gone.... File gets corrupted on said Raid 1 - gone

PSU on that system dies?

Mobo fries and takes out your Raid 1....

You are doing backups as you copy data to another system. (3-2-1)

But if you have a single system and Raid or not, and said data does not exist anywhere else, that is not a backup.
Click to expand...
it's a backup for a drive failure, yes if you delete a file it's gone on both

psu dies just replace it, mobo fries, remove the drives and put them into a USB caddy and all your files are there, it ignore metadata

Done that plenty of times

never had a mobo fry and why would it take out the raid1, the information is still there

you are thinking about a raid 0, yes that will wipe the drive if one gets fried
 
MrGuvernment said:
Install windows, enable bitlocker, reinstall windows to sell or just delete the partitions, done, data not accessible or recoverable, takes 20 mins.
Click to expand...
why would you install windows, enable bitlocker and then reinstall again, sounds like too much work when free programs can blank the drives if you want to sell them

why would you sell and old drive you will get a fraction of what you paid

that line of thought baffles me, if youi want to sell a laptop just pull the drive, clean it, put it back in and sell it like that so the new buyer can put whatever OS they want

maybe they use mint....
 
ep0x73 said:
it's a backup for a drive failure, yes if you delete a file it's gone on both

psu dies just replace it, mobo fries, remove the drives and put them into a USB caddy and all your files are there, it ignore metadata

Done that plenty of times

never had a mobo fry and why would it take out the raid1, the information is still there

you are thinking about a raid 0, yes that will wipe the drive if one gets fried
Click to expand...

That is called "redundancy' Raid 1 is "not a backup for a drive" it is providing "redundancy" for drives. There is an actual difference in the IT world.

My point was a PSU dies = can take out your mobo and your onboard raid or raid card or drives with it. I am not thinking of Raid 0 at all. Any type of failure in said single system with the raid array can corrupt / destroy said raid array.

As much as you want to try and justify "raid is a backup" in some form or another, it is not, period, end of story, there is literally nothing to debate here.
 
ep0x73 said:
why would you install windows, enable bitlocker and then reinstall again, sounds like too much work when free programs can blank the drives if you want to sell them

why would you sell and old drive you will get a fraction of what you paid

that line of thought baffles me, if youi want to sell a laptop just pull the drive, clean it, put it back in and sell it like that so the new buyer can put whatever OS they want

maybe they use mint....
Click to expand...

With what ever tool, encrypting the drive, and then deleting the partition tables assures NO data is accessible, this is quicker than doing a DD for hours or days on end.

Plenty of people sell "old drives", I mean, just go look on Ebay or any local site and look at that... people are selling "old drives".....

Sure, the chances are joe blow off the street is going to go in and try to recovery data is slim, but why risk it...

Any 2nd hand device I have bought, I have checked the drive to see if they did a proper wipe or not, as I am sure, plenty of us in IT/Cyber do similar. Simply because you do not, does not make it the norm either.
 
ep0x73 said:
why would you install windows, enable bitlocker and then reinstall again, sounds like too much work when free programs can blank the drives if you want to sell them

why would you sell and old drive you will get a fraction of what you paid

that line of thought baffles me, if youi want to sell a laptop just pull the drive, clean it, put it back in and sell it like that so the new buyer can put whatever OS they want

maybe they use mint....
Click to expand...
You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Blanking the drive takes a LOT longer than encrypting and writing over the drive. It isn't a big deal. The only person making this a big deal is you. I've been doing this for years. Whatever OS is on it is irrelevant.
 
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