How to scrub a Dell 6110 storage array
I have a Dell 6110 storage array (Equallogic 10GBE iscsi SAN) that I want to scrub clean before I sell it. What is the best way to go about this to ensure it is securely erased and the data is irretrievable? There are (24) 6 GB drives in it.
You might look at Active@ Killdisk. I've not tried it on a RAID array, but if the array shows in Disk Management as a device it should work.
Side note: RAID controllers usually allocate space on each drive for the controller's own use. That space cannot be accessed from Windows, so the drives will not be completely erased unless you pull them out of the array and erase them individually. However, it should be "good enough" unless your management or Security requires DoD-level erasure of the entire drive.
Side note: RAID controllers usually allocate space on each drive for the controller's own use. That space cannot be accessed from Windows, so the drives will not be completely erased unless you pull them out of the array and erase them individually. However, it should be "good enough" unless your management or Security requires DoD-level erasure of the entire drive.
DBAN is the commonly used free tool for this : http://www.dban.org/ DBAN
i have used BCWIPE also - and of course - you have a help line with it
i have used BCWIPE also - and of course - you have a help line with it
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Thanks for the pointers on products to use. I have run these before on local disks but never on a SAN and I am unclear how to actually do this with the software solutions. It is a quite a valuable storage array and is worth my time to pursue selling it to the interested party. I have destroyed and recreated the array itself but I am not sure that this is enough.
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Destroying and recreating the array isn't the same as erasing the disk. You'd have to at least move the disks into different order to make it harder to recreate the data, but that's still not erasing the disk, just obfuscating the order.
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It was a little more complicated than I had thought but conceptually, all of the ideas here certainly helped. There is no way to create a Windows accessible share directly on the 6110. I had to create a volume on the Dell 6110 storage array and then use a sandbox Windows 2012 server to attach to it with iSCSI Initiator. Once I did that, Windows Server 2012 saw it as a local disk and I was able to bring it online and format it. I was then able to run KillDisk Pro against it and all seems good. I haven't dealt with an external array and iSCSI before this so it was a good learning experience for me since I couldn't break anything. :)
Have personally used it serveral times. Super-easy to use, however if you do a DoD (7 pass) wipe, it WILL take a while (up to/exceeding a week).