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@midwest.social
    3·
    11 days 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.

    • yesman@lemmy.world
      2·
      11 days ago

      dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1M

      This command is much faster. Instead of random bits, it just marks everything zero (dude). Is good enough.

    • user_naa@lemmy.world
      2·
      11 days ago

      Always use /dev/urandom for this purposes. /dev/random will be locked if it doesn’t have enough entropy. It is good for getting some random kilobytes for cryptography but not 2 TB of random data for disk wipe.