I have a drive from late 2017 with about 55,000 power on hours that has failed. It was being used in my NAS in a RAID1 configuration, so I haven’t lost any data and I have replaced it with a new WD80EFPX. I would like to try to securely erase sensitive data from it before I dispose of it; rather than opening it up and physically destroying the data, I would prefer if there were a way to awaken it, just temporarily.
The drive starts, spins up, makes some soft noises, shows up as a drive in the OS, then disappears, appears again, disappears and finally makes a sharp sound and spins down. The same sequence is repeated a second time and then the drive spins down permanently.
I should add that the drive was passing weekly SMART tests fine right up to its failure.
Are there any ways to access the drive to erase it, without having to open it up?
I use Seatools which can write zero to all sectors which can clean up old disk drives and get them back in service. Seatools also checks SMART if desired.
NAS is more or less passe so I suggest using a USB enclosure and use multiple disks. Use one for backups and this way of a disk becomes faulty the backup is there.
Wiping a disk is not hard of you are looking to divest of the disk; Seatools zero wipe is absolute.
I just buy more USB enclosures and keep the old disks handy backups or temporary storage,
Larger capacity disks are awkward in NAS due to the staggering number of blocks. My old NAS cannot use larger disks so now I use USB enclosures.
I have an Orico USB-C 5-disk box I use for assorted disks. The single disk enclosures I use sit on on top of the Orico box which is somewhat larger then most single disk enclosures.. USB speeds are 5/10 gigabit which is better than ethernet. Some faster gear is starting to come to market now driven my NVMe devices. SATA 4TB SSD prices are cheaper than ever and M.2 prices are falling too.
The drive no longer stays online long enough to complete a secure erase, so software methods aren’t reliable. You might be able to overwrite part of the disk—like the first sectors with partition tables and file system data—by connecting it directly over SATA and attempting a zero-fill, but the drive will likely drop out before a full wipe is finished. Secure erase commands also require the disk to remain stable, which isn’t possible here. If the data isn’t very sensitive, erasing the first few gigabytes makes recovery much harder, but if the data is important to protect, the only certain option is physical destruction—drilling through the platters, scratching them, or using a shredding or degaussing service.
If the disk no longer remains operational to do a secure erase you may need to do the step over a few times but keep i n mind that hard disks eventually wear out.
Using a drill will destroy the platters but give the disk is toast no peasant will waste time on it and so just toss it in the trash.
