Securely Erasing a Full Terabyte

A word of warning: if you ever have the desire to securely erase a large hard drive, do so before you remove it from the computer; don’t wait until you remove it and try to do this over USB.

Recently, I replaced a 1 TB hard drive in a Linux server on my home network. I copied the data, swapped out the drive, and hooked it up using a USB dock so that I could run wipe on it before drilling a couple of holes through the platters and disposing of it. This drive contained sensitive personal and financial information, so, short of sandblasting the platters, or perhaps shredding or melting it, this seemed to be a fairly secure way to dispose of it.

The wipe command writes over the entire drive many times using patterns designed to make it unlikely that the data could ever be recovered, even by someone equipped with a magnetic force microscope. Here’s an excerpt from the wipe manpage:

wipe repeatedly overwrites special patterns to the files to be destroyed, using the fsync() call and/or the O_SYNC bit to force disk access. In normal mode, 34 patterns are used (of which 8 are random). These patterns were recommended in an article from Peter Gutmann entitled “Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory”.

It turns out that running wipe on a 1 TB drive connected via USB is no joke. I started running it two weeks ago and it just finished the last of the 34 passes.

As a side note, this is probably the first time I’ve proactively replaced a hard drive, not as an upgrade, but as a preventative measure. The drive in question was about five years old and seemed to be nearing failure. This is in contrast to the usual situation, in which I’m replacing a drive and attempting to recover data after it fails. In order to stay on top of things, I’m now using smartmontools to monitor the health of the drives in this server.