Hard Drive accessability without all drives and without freenas

[shackrock]

Hi all,

I am going to swap my HDDs out, in total. I would like to know if the current hard drives with data, set up in ZFS RAIDZ1, will be accessible in future use if I destroy the zpools and volumes right now.

i.e. is my data "safely gone forever" if I destroy volumes and zpools - or do I also need to write random data to the drives? If I do need to write data to it, can FreeNas assist me in this endeavor before I put the new drives in?

Thanks.

 

[hugovsky]

If you destroy the volumes data will be lost for good. If you really want to make sure it's gone, destroy the drives. If you're going to repurpose the drives, it's safe just by destroying volumes, as long as you mark "destroy data" when detaching volume.

 

[Glorious1]

If you're going to sell the drives or something like that, it might be a good idea to write zeros to them. You can do that with the dd command via SSH. Something like

Code:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ada0 bs=1048576 count=3000000

should fill a 3-TB drive with zeros. Just change the first digit of the last number to match your drive size. Obviously you want to make sure you're finished with the drive and you specify the correct drive (with "of") before doing this.

 

[hugovsky]

With ZFS, I wouldn't bother with that. I doubt someone could read your files.

 

[Glorious1]

Well, I mean, if the drive has nuclear launch codes or passwords to bank accounts with billions of dollars or something . . .

 

[depasseg]

I don't know the answer to your question, but this is exactly the reason I would love to use encrypted drives/pool with the option to automatically mount (no user interaction needed). So when I pull a drive, whatever data was on the drive would be encrypted.