Do I Need to Securely Erase a RAID 0 Slice before Selling?

[Ben Jobe]

I'm selling four hard drives which were arranged in two RAID 0 arrays. My understanding of RAID 0 is that the data is evenly distributed across the slices. So my assumption is that I can sell one of the slices with fear of anyone being able to reconstruct the data without the second slice. Is that correct? Should I securely erase the RAID 0 slices anyways just in case?

Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[drtweak]

I would erase them either way. You can plug them in, each drive seperate, then use a drive wiping program like Active Kill disk, CCleaner, ect to do at least a 1 pass but a 3 pass it best. It really depends on what data is on there though. if its not anything important i wouldn't worry about it as long as the drives are sold seperatly.

 

[Ben Jobe]

I would erase them either way. You can plug them in, each drive seperate, then use a drive wiping program like Active Kill disk, CCleaner, ect to do at least a 1 pass but a 3 pass it best. It really depends on what data is on there though. if its not anything important i wouldn't worry about it as long as the drives are sold seperatly.

Thanks for your suggestion. I did a 1 pass wipe on all of them. I only had a USB 3 docking station so it took 10 hours to wipe each 4TB drive. But better safe than sorry I guess.

 

[drtweak]

Oh Snaps yea a 4TB hard drive will take a long time. I do 3 pass wipes on all new hard drives we get for our clients and to have in stock only because if a hard drive is going to fail it usually failes pretty quick if its bad out of the box. but i know i did a 3Tb and it took 24 hours almost for a 3 Pass wipe