Warning: those of y’all dropping in for another of my rants about society, politicians *spit*, Mass Media Podpeople, et al, just shuffle on down the page; there’ll be some of that somewhere there. This is a compgeeky post.
It’s so obvious. I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing for several years, but just never got A Round To It. *sigh*
Little things can make a whale of a difference when having to work on computers. Besides just having a wealth of knowledge (and knowing where to get more :-)) and a minimal talent for working one’s way through puzzles, the right tools (hardware and software) are critical to doing things well and quickly (and easily).
So, what’s the tool I’ve meant to get for some time but just (for no good reason at all) hadn’t before? This:
There’s more to it than that–a power supply and a couple more cables to allow it to work with SATA drives–but being able to just slap that lil puppy onto a bare drive (OK, pulled from a problem computer) and plug the thing into any USB 2.0 port and just whale away at it with diag tools is a BIG plus, as opposed to slapping it physically into a test system or attempting to work on the drive while it’s in the dead/troubled computer.
Bang on easy. And it’s so cheap, I have no excuse for not buying the thing a long time ago.
Right now, I’m using it to wipe a drive of ALL data (35 passes of semi-randon 0s and 1s over each and every part of the drive) for reuse in another system. Connected to THIS computer, while I continue to just go about my normal affairs. *heh* Didn’t even have to fire up a “bench” comp just for the gig.
So, while I’m kicking myself for not picking one of these lil tools up before, I’m glad I finally did. MUCh better (for me) even than having a portable USB-enabled case to plop drives into. This I can just place a drive on (the inside of an opened) ESD case, plug it in and take off.
I found mine here (and no, I’m not an “affiliate” nor do I get any kinda rake off; it’s just where I bought mine). Neat lil toy tool.
35 passes? Wow…DOD still says 7 passes (3 1s, 3 0s, 1 random) is sufficient to clear the drive….We had to wipe thousands of drives coming from a customer in order to re-usae them. Best tool we found was dban. Uses a LINUX kernel and is all business. With 6 Dell PIIIs with SCSI and IDE cables hanging out the front of the case, connected with a scavenged KVM, we cranked large piles of drives, and it was faster than the commercial program we had first tried, and faster than any of the free tolls from the drive makers. I recall it was about 25-40% faster, and also the display was pretty good at letting you tell if the drive was shot before going further.
dBan booted from a CD (or floppy) and your were off to the races in moments, and it has at least two more detailed wipes than the DoD standard, as well as a few lesser ones as well.
Tools, it’s all about tools….
I hear you, Curt. You know the DoD has “upped” its requirements for dealing with hard drives with sensitive data. I’ve never trusted the old “7-pass” wipe, myself, but I’m paranoid, I guess. I used to buy “reconditioned” or “recertified” drives all the time (not for clients but for personal use), and I’d always run one or two file recovery programs on them to see if folks had been careful… before wiping them for my own use.
Most of ’em (even the “factory recertified” drives) had tons of data readily available for anyone who took a few simple steps recovering the data. *sigh* Never tempted by the stuff, but it made me chary of sending drives back for service or exchange without a.) recovering data since the last backup, if I could and then b.) either “nuking” them with multipass wiping softwre or (if the drive was completely inaccessible, even with logic board switch, etc.) degaussing.
And yeh, degaussing is step two after multi-pass overwrites for DoD dealing with drives with sensitive data (last step is physical destruction, incineration, etc.–for low-level sensitive data. *heh* What is prescribed for sooper-dooper “gotta kill ya if I tell ya” data? I dunno. :-))
After a drive’s been degaussed, it can be low-level formatted then FDISKed/Partitioned, etc. Of course, I’ve not done a low-level format in many, many moons, and likely I never will need to again, but it’s nice to know that data can be destroyed beyond almost any (ALMOST any) effort to reconstruct it. After all, the anti-free speech goons are gaining ground…
*sigh*