I recommend against using more than 4 hard drives in a single computer, and recommend getting more computers as you scale. Here's why:
Bad drives during a Secure Erase will wreak havoc on your machines. Right now, I'm testing a pallet of hard drives for a poor guy who must have had something happen during shipping. The failures are slowing me to an absolute crawl. If you load 4 good hard drives into a wiper, you just tell it to wipe, and come back later. No big deal. When you have drives that have problems, tons of weird things can happen. You need to run a health check before you start a Secure Erase- if one of the drives dies during the erase, your computer may just sit there a LONG time before the erase finishes on the other drives. And, don't ever think of unplugging it! If you do that during a Secure Erase, you've just made bricks. The problem is that you can't always find faults in drives during the "Pre-Erase Testing". For example, in this pallet, I've had a few cases where one of my tester computers has been stuck for 10-12 hours just "Spinning its wheels". If your computers have more drives connected, you make a lock-up more likely, and you increase the financial risk if the power goes out on one of your machines.
Being in scrapping, you'll get computers that can handle wiping just fine- no worries if you scrapped some. My wipers are all HP towers with Pentium CPUs in them. Hardly something that would be worth much in resale, but for hard drive wiping, they handle it flawlessly! Well, as long as you feed them good drives that is
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