A Qnap NAS has a drive with some bad sectors, I want to RMA it, but before just want to figure out how to prepare a drive? It’s part of a raid 5 setup of 4 drives unencrypted. So I want to remove it and wipe it. Got a Linux machine I can use, but never done this before.

What are common Linux tools to do that sensibly?

  • socphoenix
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    16 hours ago

    Assuming the drive writes normally a simple command like

    dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sdX

    Where sdX is the location of the drive should do the trick. Depending on drive time this may take a bit.

    • Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz
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      16 hours ago

      Yeah my first thought was just keep running dd commands, and sooner or later you’ll have the hdd wiped.

    • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de
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      16 hours ago

      Just keep in mind that you can’t wipe the bad sectors that have been remapped. That’s unlikely to be an issue for a personal drive, but something to consider if it held particularly sensitive information.

      • catloaf@lemm.ee
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        15 hours ago

        Sectors are what, 4kb? The odds of something sensitive being in those each of those 4kb is low (but never zero).

        If the drive implements the ATA secure erase command properly, it should also clear all the remapped sectors too. But I don’t know if I trust them to implement it properly. Maybe try it and inspect the disk with a hex editor.