Building a station to erase multiple (4) Sata HDD at once

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>>170185
Use: Linux, USB, ATA_SECURE_ERASE_UNIT, USB/SATA toasters, digisparks.

USB is hotpluggable, so the only other thing you need is a $2 Digispark hot-glued to the toaster to provide a status LED so you know if it's erasing, erased, or has a problem. Not all drives support SECURE_ERASE_UNIT, but the ones that do, the PC issues one command once, and then the drive erases itself without needing to be sent a terabyte of zeroes.

The basic idea is that you have a small Linux distribution that boots off a CDROM (so there's no way it can get a virus, and no way you can boot off your hard disks by accident), that runs a script that detects a drive being dropped in, tries to secure_erase it, falls back to writing zeroes if it can't, and sets the status LEDs accordingly so the operator knows when the slot is free for the next drive. It could even log the serials and status of each drive it processes to some kind of central database.

Biggest cost should be the toasters, which are ~$15-30 per slot. It'll pay for itself in the time saved by being able to drop disks in and yank them out whilst the PC is running, rather than having to wait for all the disks to finish and then disassemble the PC. Your average CS student intern should be able to knock this up for you in a day or so.

>>170197
>>170185
Oh, and if you're not an IT recycling charity, put your hand in your pocket and pay someone to make this for you.

>>170198
I'm actually an apprentice there trying to impress my boss, currently it takes like3 weeks to do 200 PCs, I'm trying to get that down to like 2 days. Thanks for the help!

>>170201
Definitely check out scripting and digisparks. They're $2 programmable USB devices, perfect for interfacing your scripts with the real world.

If you're using two-slot toasters, look for ones where you can eject the drives independently. I'd go with single-slot ones myself.

Do the math on how fast USB3 can feed zeroes down the line, and how fast PCIe can feed the USB cards. You don't need to saturate the SATA interface, just the write speeds of the drives themselves. Design your hardware layout accordingly. The whole system can certainly be done for less than $100, plus a spare PC, and there's no reason you have to stop at six drives.

Other obvious ideas would be a Bluetooth pager that goes off whenever it needs a new drive fed in, and a sticky label printer that prints out a "This is disk X and it was wiped by method Y at Time on Date".

The real key, though, is driving out inefficiency from the entire system. And by system, I mean the entire workflow: the PC, the drives, the guy loading and unloading them. You want to automate anything that stands in the way of the disk-nuker running 100% of the time.

Blancco 5 is capable of multi disc secure erase.
Not free but pretty cheap. You can get a free trial license

https://www.blancco.com/buy/

>>170227
>One license per hard disk erasure is required
>An internet connection is required for activation and use
>512 MB RAM memory in most cases, erasing machines with 2+ HDDs requires more RAM
hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha