Re: Advice regarding servers and Wiping Drives after testing

Marcia,

please reply to the list, not to me personally.

On 2007-08-28 Harris, Marcia wrote:
> I agree that #1 holds no garuantee that (some) data could not be
> recovered from the disk.  #4 looks reasonable, but after what you said
> about drive wipe utilities not working well with raid arrays, what
> would you use, and could you do it within your time contraints?

I don't recall having said anything about wipe-tools not working well
with RAIDs. I said that just making disks into a RAID does not guarantee
secure deletion of the data on said disks. Just make sure to wipe the
raw device(s) instead of partitions/filesystems/whatever.

Fact is, to wipe a disk you need to overwrite the entire disk at least
once. That's the minimum timeframe required (unless you burn the disks),
and there's no way to magically speed this up. You can, however, wipe
several disks in parallel, if you have appropriate hardware, which will
reduce the total amount of time you have to invest.

Regards
Ansgar Wiechers
-- 
"All vulnerabilities deserve a public fear period prior to patches
becoming available."
--Jason Coombs on Bugtraq