RE: complete "scrubbing" of our data from the disk

Jones, John (US) wrote on Tue, 20 Sep 2005 19:38:07 GMT:

> In all seriousness...
> 
> Install them in a PC with a SCSI card & use a cheap/freeware
> DODWipe to zero the drives. 
> 

Another option on a machine that is Linux capable is to move an 
IOA  and the disks to a Linux partition, reformat, and use an 
equivalent Linux utility.

While the DST option to destroy disk unit data is relatively 
simplistic, someone would need to be disk technology and i5/OS 
savvy to recover any bits & pieces of data off the drive.  While 
the knowledge needed isn't trivial, I'd imagine that in most 
cases drives from an iSeries that will be resold will go to 
another iSeries customer who isn't going to take the time or 
effort to attempt to discover what was previously on the units.  
And remember as soon as you begin to add the units to a different 
iSeries, they'll get reformated again, potentially get parity 
stripes created (maybe in a different location than they were 
previously), and if added to a disk pool with add & balance 
option, have data placed on the drive.  If the drives don't got 
to another iSeries, as soon as the drives get reformated to non-
iSeries use, you have effectively made another pass across the 
data and mucked up the sector sizes in such a manner that the 
level of knowledge needed to recover data has increased again.

All this nattering simply points out that the risk of data 
recovery is not zero, but it also isn't very probably either.