Testing and Wiping Hard Drives - Any New Products?

Originally Posted by hills

Just an opinion, but i think times are changing. HDD's and removable SSD's are on their way out. The consumer trend seems to be toward lightweight devices like tablets and iphones. Most of these have memory and storage soldered directly to the motherboard.

I had three Chromebooks come in this past week. They're rather neat. Lower cost and can go for up to 10 hours on a charge.

I suppose it is what it is.

It might not be wise to invest in a technology that's slowly becoming obsolete. I can remember a time when a 1Gb memory chip or a good CD/DVD drive were hot sellers but they have very little value now. It's likely to be the same with HDD's. There could come a time when there's no market share for anything smaller than 4TB.Those things would take forever to wipe.

I use a product suggested by another user on here. https://partedmagic.com/



It is $11 and a stand-alone OS (a slightly modified linux OS). I have run it off a thumbdrive and have it on a computer that I can plug up to 6 drives in at a time to wipe. I only do SATA secure erase. If a drive I get doesn't have a sata connection (IDE, SAS, etc), I just take the board off for scrap and drill through the rest of the drive. But for anything I resell or reuse I do secure erase.

I also agree with that the HDDs you get will be less over time. You'll see SSDs for a while and then you'll see m2 sata/nvme drives for a while then eventually no drives. and thats when itll suck as youll have to wipe on each device individually through its OS which may or may not be locked/pw protected.