Not all drives can do a Secure Erase, but most can. Some older ones can't, but I don't see those very often. For those, I have to use a triple zero-pass wipe system. But, those drives are becoming more and more rare. I'd say that at least 95% of all the drives I see can do a Secure Erase. The ones that can't usually are the low capacity ones that won't be MTSV much longer anyways....
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I've looked into those enterprise things a little. For example, one of the products I saw was the White Canyon FlexStation. They say that it can take 24 drives without caddies. Honestly, that doesn't impress me much- here's why:
Caddies aren't a big deal- I don't use them anyways. I could easily fabricate the case they've built with less than $100 of stuff at the Home Depot. I had to do a lot of digging to find a price on the thing, but it's about $14,000 .... PLUS licenses to actually get the privilege to use their wiping software. For me, that's an insane amount of money that I can't justify (Even if I had $14,000 burning a hole in my pocket... which I wish was the case)
I'm using HP towers and some monitors that came in for E-Waste recycling. So, I'm out nothing in hardware costs. Parted Magic is a one time purchase- it can be used an indefinite number of times, with no further cost to me. I have six computers, so I can wipe 24 drives at once. That's equal in capacity to one FlexStation, but $13,989 cheaper.
I think JJinLV has a point with using servers if you're doing volume. I could probably benefit from a few of them. Doing a basic eBay search shows an example server - an HP DL320s for about $250 - is a LOT cheaper than the FlexStation. Granted, that model can only take 12 hard drives, but two of them equals a FlexStation for way less than $1000. And again, I don't have to pay-per-wipe.
I don't like how the cables become a spaghetti mess with my machines, and they take up a LOT of space. But, I know that they'll work. I've run a few thousand hard drives through my testers. I believe a lot in "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". I don't know a lot about servers, but I'd like to try it out when I have some more room to set up one of my racks and a server to play with. I talked with another kinda-local SMF guy about servers- when he gets a SATA server in, I'll give it a shot and see if it works better. Right now, I've got so much stuff going on that it's super exciting, but at the same time, I can't worry about upgrading systems that are doing their job well
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