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Secure Hard Drive Deletion Appliance?
An anonymous reader asks "I am searching for a box into which I can plug a hard drive (IDE or SCSI of various flavors) and automatically begin a secure deletion process (DoD 2250 compliant or the like would be good). This is normally for dead drives which need to be RMA-ed. Because of various regulations (HIPAA for starters), we need to at least attempt to do a good job clearing the disk. I've heard from a number of places, including this Slashdot story, that degaussing isn't great. There are software solutions out there, but in general, I want to toss a replacement hard drive in and not have to hunt around for hardware to put the bad drive in in order to run the software. Given the right case, a solid state drive, some SCSI cards and one of various pieces of software, I can imagine such a beast. Has anyone seen someone selling something like this?" No case-opening is necessary to use a USB/IDE converter, which might be a good middle ground. Any other ideas?
dban.sourceforge.net
http://www.driveduplicators.com/124.html
:)
Its primarily a hard drive duplicator but it also has DoD 5220.22-M level wipe. Sorry to plug a specific product
I'll second that, I've used DBAN a few times just in the last few days on old drives we're preparing to toss (finally retiring very old hardware).
I run it from the Ultimate Boot CD, http://www.ultimatebootcd.com, which has a ton of other diagnostic utilities on it, including the drive diag tools from all the major manufacturers. Extremely handy little CD to have around.
Uhhh... I disagree. I work at an organisation which falls under HIPAA. All the money we would spend on new hard drives for no apparent reason would mean that developmentally delayed persons in the community would be unable to get access to the resources we exist to provide.
/dev/random onto your disk a few times. Anybody know any good reason why that would be insuffiecient?
Whenever somebody moves from one department to another, they need either a new PC, new HD, or a fresh setup on their old PC after a secure wipe. Every time somebody leaves the organisation, or a new person arrives. Every time a drive dies and the PC needs to get a new one under warranty.
Right now, I am probably doing a minimum of ten secure wipes every month. A new hard drive would cost roughly a hundred bucks. That's 12,000 dollars annually, minimum, just on hard drives, which would be wasted. That's a certain number of hours we would need to cut back the day program, leaving mentally retarded people roaming the streets without any help. Including the mentally retarded people who aren't allowed near children because they have sexually assaulted them in the past. That's a certain number of winter coats that can't be bought for people who can't work a steady job.
So, we use a utility called DBAN, Darik's Boot And Nuke. It's part of a free x86 rescue CD I downloaded. It comes with a bootable linux live CD, which includes an ntfs resizer, and memtest86. I usually just run it in teh machine where the HD is, rather than pulling the HDD out. In particular, this is much handier for laptops than a special device would be. OTOH, it would be easy enough to get an external hot swap caddy, and use it as your appliance, just plug it into any machine.
Also, you can always just dd
While this may seem at first to be just a one off joke, there is really alot to be said for torching a drive. In addition to the massive physical damage, you will heat the magnetic layers past their Curie point, so their magnetic orientation won't matter: they won't be magnetic anymore.
Happy torching!
Phus. Sysiphus.