So I have been tasked with wiping a ton of 10TB drives, they will only be used for internal use, so a serious DoD wipe is not needed. I do need to get rid of the MBR that is on the drives so that the software sees them as a fresh disk because otherwise they will reject it from the host.
I was given some old equipment to use, they are huge 100 drive storage devices. I was trying to use DABN and not having luck.
I was curious if anyone had any suggestions on what to try for such a large quantity of disks. They want me to use the server to wipe.
They are connected to the device via an HBA.
If anyone was curious, for the DBAN I was trying to use, I kept getting hung at PCI (sysfs) and it wouldn’t go any further.
Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly welcomed.
I like openssl as a fast way to generate random data, although I’ve never tried it at that scale. You might actually run into other bottlenecks besides drive speed.
If you truly only need to wipe the MBR and not actually make an attempt at erasing any data, then, something like the below will work. GPT formatted disks will be slightly different, i think.
Thank you to everyone, it looks like cleaning the MBR with the tee command is going to be my first test batch since it will only take a few seconds for all the drives in the machine, I will keep you all posted on how it works. Just scripted it and gonna see what I can break. lol. Enjoy your long weekend!!!
nwipe is the command line equivalent of DBAN for systems where you have trouble booting DBAN. All major Linux distros include it, and failing that you can compile it without too much hassle