Wipe drive on Snap 4500

[wcjennifer]

I have done a lot of seaching, but have not found a definitive solution to wiping the drives specific to a Snap 4500 Appliance. For a different model, I have read to remove one drive at a time, wipe it, reinstall it, and then let the RAID rebuild. Continue until all drives are done. Is that a legitimate solution while still keeping the Guardian O/S intact? Do I have to perform this on all 4 drives or would it be sufficient to do 2 or 3? I am interested in wiping the drives to resell the unit. Thank you for any assistance provided.

Jennifer

[SaFeHeX]

It depends on how destructive you want the data to be destroyed.

For example, if you are selling the server, some people like to destroy everything, including GOS, so they remove the hard drives, install them into a PC and zero fill each drive etc. Sadly this renders the snap fairly useless to anyone, unless they have the abilities to re-install GOS.

If you are just blanking the machine for your own use or are not completely paranoid about someone recovering the data, just deleting the raid set and then recreating a new raid set, should be reasonable enough. If you re-build a raid zero set first (which is faster) just to get things settled and running again. Then you can move on to building a new raid 5 set for example.

Some people do things such as swapping drives around to destroy the raid set that way, but in my experience that can sometimes lead to problems.

I am no expert on this, one of the guru's here may know of a quick and better way to put everything back to factory settings or similar?

A few of us here, Own 4500's so it's highly likely you will get some better answers later on.

If you are selling the Snap it's worth more to most people with GOS intact (if they don't already own one) or it's scrap value if not.

Personally i like it when people wipe them completely or sell them without drives, and i can pic them up for peanuts!

Out of curiosity, what version of GOS is it running?

[wcjennifer]

Thanks for the information. I'm not sure if it helped or just gave me more questions/options I am looking to sell them and am concerned about HIPAA data. I wanted to preserve the OS since they would be worth more money. The version is GOS 4.2.054 SP3.

I ponder these options. Thanks - Jennifer

[SaFeHeX]

I had to look up HIPAA as i didn't know what it was. Maybe it's country specific?

I suspected you were wanting to sell the unit/s and if it's sensative data then i can understand your reasoning for wanting wipe them.

For what it's worth, most people are not experts in data recovery, especially after data has already been erased, so to speak. I would deffinitely advise deleting the raid set and re-building a new set as a precautionary measure but i can't see that you would need to go to anything more extreme.

From what i understand, building a raid 5 set for example, takes several hours or even days in some cases if the drives are large enough. I'm fairly sure that because of the length of time involved, the original data is being properly ereased and the drives are reformatted/repartitioned etc properly by GOS.

Maybe specialist computer phorensics could recover the data but even then i suspect the data would be gone.

I've bought a couple of second hand snaps in the past, some with data still on them and to be honest the first thing i do is get rid of the data, it's of no use to me or of any value to most people, it's just taking up space that average joe wants to use to store their own files.

Some people are super paranoid of course but i think it can be a bit extreme in some cases. Organisations literally sledge hammering the drives after erasing them. It's a waste of good useable equipment and such a shame.

Oh and i forgot to add, if you erase the drives as i suggested, try yourself and see if you can get any of the data back. Data is a lot easier to loose than it is to recover IMO

Goodluck.

[Phoenix32]

Yes, you CAN save the GOS -AND- do a secure wipe of the drives. It is pretty simple.

Sorry Jennifer, but I am sick to death of lurkers not ever joining in. Maybe one of the 50 or so lurkers who have already read this message thread will come forward and tell you how to do it. But until they start joining in, I AM DONE!

All I will say is, YES, you can in fact save your GOS -AND- do a secure wipe of your drives that would meet your company policies and the legal requirements, and it is pretty simple. Requiring less than your original proposed method, which will NOT meet the requirements you need.

Good luck... The 4500 is worth much much less if the GOS has been wiped (next to nothing)