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Hi new to the forum.
Wanted some advise on wiping multiple laptops. Currently I'm doing ten side by side along a long desk using blancco from a switch and flash drive. Is there a better way of doing it. Can you stack laptops and use external monitor?
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
Eddie
High and welcome to the forum! Is the problem the space, the speed, or both?
Hi and thanks for replying. Both really. Just wondered if there is a more efficient way of data wiping laptops. I stack PC's ontop of each other and use the one tft monitor, keyboard. Can something like this be done with laptops?
Thanks
The forum members best qualified to answer aren't posting much lately but hopefully they'll chime in. Never myself used any blancco hardware or programs. From a space perspective, a sturdy mail shelf with thin slots like this:
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|---------------|
|---------------|
|---------------|
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will allow you to stack the laptops vertically while leaving the screens open for access and monitoring while taking up only one laptop space on the table. For speed nothing beats removing drives and plugging them directly to a wiping deck which removes any data bottlenecks you encounter while wiping through a cable. I know blancco has a system like that too but it does require labor to remove the drives and potentially to adjust for different form factors like mSATA too.
Thanks again. Do you need the laptop lid open? Would using a connection lead to a monitor work? Or does the laptop goto sleep if closed? Maybe need to change settings in the bios?
Thanks again.
Usually the laptops need to be open to get power to the hard drive in the first place to wipe them. There are probably ways around that but that's beyond my knowledge. So you'd have them open then slide the base in like this with the same diagram as above except from the side view:
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|____ <laptop
------- <shelf
With the screens open you should be able to put one on each shelf just fine. I don't know anything about blancco's system to know if a multi computer feed to a single monitor would work the same with desktops as laptops. Don't know why it wouldn't but really don't know blancco's stuff at all.
Is using a electromagnet would work to wipe HDD?
Try the search term " hard drive wiping machine ".Quote:
Originally Posted by eddiebell14
It's generally pretty easy to remove hard drives these days. The thing i've found though is that a high percentage of laptop hard drives won't pass a surface test. Part & parcel with that is that the hard drives tend to be over 500 GB. The larger the capacity the drive ... the higher the chances it will have bad sectors AND the darn things take forever to wipe. You really should do a three pass overwrite if it's your intention to resell -or- destroy the data on the drive.
Near as i can tell ... traditional hard drives are rapidly becoming obsolete. That technology is being replaced by solid state drives.
You get the older SSD's in the 2.5" form factor
You get some M.2 sata drives but they aren't all that common.
Nowadays ... a good many manufacturers are soldering the data storage chip right to the board.
Another trend that's fairly commonplace is to have something like an 80 GB storage chip on the board and the rest of the storage takes place on the cloud.
Traditional sector by sector overwrites aren't done with SSD's. It's just a one step process. * click * .... and poof .... all of the data on the SSD is gone !
Another trend has been from laptops to tablets to small handheld devices.
When i look around at all of the rapid fire technological changes going on ... i don't see much of a future for traditional hard drives anymore. They are quickly going the way of the dinosaur just like floppy disks and cd/dvd's as storage media did. You might not to want to get too heavily invested there.
Just guesswork but ... it would more likely destroy the hard drive ? There's often a firmware chip on the logic board that contains an instruction set that tells the HDD how to operate. Sometimes there are hidden partitions on the hard drive platters which serve a similar purpose ?Quote:
Originally Posted by CopperMiner
Anyhow ... nuke those with an electromagnet ... and the poor old hard drive wouldn't have any idea of where to go or what to do.
Does the OP wants to wipe them to reuse them or just permanently destroy their contents?
The sense i get is that he wants to wipe them for re-use.Quote:
Originally Posted by CopperMiner
If you wanted to destroy them nuking them with an electromagnet would be one way. Some laptops have a strike point. Hit that with a hammer and that shatters the glass platters of the hard drive.
I usually just pull the logic board when i want to destroy a hard drive. E-waste buyers pay fairly well for that kind of circuit board.
You can't use a magnet for a truly secure wipe. The magnet is a scrambler and a strong enough one will cause irrepadable drive malfunctions but not necessarily erase the data. You need to securely wipe them or damage the platters to satisfy data destruction standards.Quote:
Originally Posted by CopperMiner
Thanks everyone. I wipe the drives using blancco as that is what my customer demands. I then resell them giving the customer a rebate. Blancco usually takes about 1hr to completely wipe a hdd half that for a ssd. At the moment I line 10 laptops up on a long desk linked to an internet switch as you need that for blancco to connect to the management console for your reporting system. Just wondered if I could maybe streamline the process with closed lids laptops ontop of each other with 1 monitors to check progress.
Thanks everyone
Checked the system settings for ten different laptops at the shop and could simply adjust all of them to stay powered on with the lids closed. Did Windows, Mac and Linux machines. No problems. So since they can stay on then you can definitely monitor them via a switch that let's you toggle between connected devices and can just stack them without a shelf. Only caveat is you have to be able to log onto the devices to do so. You may be able to adjust it in BIOS too but it wasn't obvious to me how.
That's great mate, thank you. I checked the bios and found in advanced settings stay on when power supply connected works when lid is closed.
Cheers
Eddie
10 laptops at a time is a pretty good rate. I have a wiping station I built from and old server for wiping loose disks and do about 8 at a time. As far as "wiping faster" not really possible if you are using Secure erase to wipe, that's just as fast as the hardware on the hdd will wipe. So your only option is more concurrency, which is only limited by your space and positioning
KSS is right. You want to wipe more, just keep adding on wiping computers. That only works to a point, because you can only physically load them so much. I can wipe 48 drives at a time if I fire up all the wiping machines. But by the time I get to the last computer, the first one is done. So if you want to run more than that, you either need help or you will be RUNNING all day. Some drives also take longer to wipe than others. I had some server drives come in last month, and that lot took me way longer than I thought. Those drives just took forever to wipe. I got to the point where I'd load up the wiping machine before I went to bed and they would be almost done when I woke up.
If they're required to use a blancco system though you'd want as few blancco devices as possible bc $$$$$$$ lol