Selling NAS w/ drives

[tribunal3117]

I'm planning on selling my old NAS and the disks that have been in there. Typically before I get rid of old HDDs, whether to the dumpster or friends/family, I will run a disk scrubbing utility on the devices to make sure that any sensitive data is unrecoverable. Do I need to go to such length with data that's been part of a RAID5 array, or will just reshuffling the disks and reformatting the array be sufficient, given the data is already fragmented?

[dolbyman]

make sure you scrub the disks thoroughly...

[dosborne]

Any step you take reduces the chance of their success. Re-ordering the drives probably would not make any difference.

In most general cases, putting the drives into a USB dock and removing the partitions, then returning the drives to the NAS and formatting them would usually be enough to stop the average curious person making simple attempts to recover any data. This is simple to do and ensures a clean setup for the next user of the NAS (reset the NAS to default settings too).

Unless *ALL* the disks are scrubbed (with a secure erase tool) there is always a chance that if someone was really motivated, they could potentially recover some fragments or full files. It all defends on how dedicated they were to doing so.

It all depends on the sensitivity of your data and ultimately is your decision to make.

[tribunal3117]

Good to know. I'll run them through DBAN.

[Moogle Stiltzkin]

pull drives out, then insert to desktop pc and run something like killdisk to thoroughly wipe the drives before u sell them
https://www.killdisk.com/eraser.html

obviously backup whatever important before doing any of that.'