Sanitizing drives

[pleeber]

I have a question about sanitizing drives on the 3par arrays. I have to sanitize some 3par arrays.
Some manufacturers of arrays write certain blocks on the disks with an identifier. When we sanitize we usually connect our system directly to the add-on chassis and wipe the complete drive so we would need to know ahead of time if any blocks need to be preserved. If not preserved the drive becomes useless after the wipe.

Does anyone know if 3PAR does this and if so which blocks they use (it is usually either the first or last block) any help would be greatly appreciated.

regards

[josh0875]

Pleeber,
I believe you are trying to securely erase the data on the drives. 3PAR doesn't have any way to sanitize the drives. Only HP array I know that can do that is the XP, which has licensed based capacity license to erase the data using the industry standard algorithm (like RSA standard). So far 3PAR has no such capabilities.

[pleeber]

Ok then I should be able to disconnect each drive shelf and erase the drives jbod style right?

[Richard Siemers]

Not sure about the JBOD question in relation to re-using the system after sanitation.

Alternatively, look into deleting your spares then thick provision out the entire 3PAR available capacity (super large R1 with a set size of 4 or whatever is max), this will writes 0s over the entire space... then if you require higher sanitation standards... you could allocate those LUNs to a host and use which ever secure erase tools against the luns that you prefer. Might even suggest over provisioning the unit and running secure erase until IO operations halt do to no free space left.