[kwlug-disc] Don't do what I did...

[Chris Frey]

haha... I was bracing myself for something really bad... When a message
starts with "Don't do what I did" and continues with "so I've been
wiping drives" the story ending usually writes itself. :-)

Glad it was not the case this time!

- Chris


On Mon, Mar 01, 2021 at 07:12:42PM -0500, CrankyOldBugger wrote:
> So I have been (very slowly) wiping all of my old, unused hard drives so
> that they would be ready for whatever may come in the future.
> 
> To do this, I was using "nwipe", which is a Linux equivalent of the old
> Derick's Boot and Nuke (DBAN).  It is a very simple program.
> 
> Hardware-wise I was running the nwipe on a Raspberry Pi 4, with a USB
> toaster drive bay device.  I've had this toaster for quite some time now.
> 
> I found that this setup works well as the Raspi isn't my main driver so it
> can run in the background, and I only needed to occasionally look at it
> over a KVM switch.  I've managed to go through a dozen drives so far with
> no issues.  But then I started running into issues where my 3TB and 4TB
> drives were reading at 2TB.  I thought maybe it was a limitation of the
> Raspi.  After much duckduckduckgo'ing, I finally figured out (to my
> embarrassment)  that my toaster is only 32 bit, thus a 2TB limit.
> 
> I went on Amazon and picked up a newer (USB3 as well) toaster and sure
> enough, the larger drives were reading at their correct size.  Plus, with
> the older USB2 toaster, I was getting a max of 30MB/s transfer; the newer
> toaster gets me 80-90 MB/s.  So now the 4TB drives only take 3 days instead
> of a week or so...
> 
> If you're the curious type, the new toaster is this one:
> https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B01MTLMTL0/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

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