I suspect that Option 4 (Initialize all disks) only wipes out the metadata and does not actually rewrite any disk blocks as it does not take very long to complete
disk zero spares zero's out all your spare disks. The benefit of this is faster rebuild of a spare should a disk fail. If the spares aren't zero'd the first thing ONTAP will do when it grabs a spare is zero it, thus taking longer to rebuild ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bert Kiers" kiersb@xs4all.net To: "Nils Vogels" bacardicoke@gmail.com Cc: toasters@mathworks.com Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2007 11:29 AM Subject: Re: Disk content erase on a 740 running 6.2.2.
On Mon, Aug 13, 2007 at 11:33:53PM +0200, Nils Vogels wrote:
Hey Oskar!
On 8/13/07, Oskar Pienkos oskar_pienkos@sfu.ca wrote:
Hello,
I'm decommissioning my old 740 running Ontapp 6.2.2 and would like to wipe the disk content. Any ideas how can I do it?
I'd boot into maintenance mode and choose to reinitialise disks and reinstall ONTAP. On ONTAP versions 7 that's menu choice 4.
How well does this erase the contents? Is it all overwritten? How often? Or is it just a reformat of some kind that only rewrites the meta data?
What does 'disk zero spares' actually do?
One time, when I really needed to be sure the data was gone forever, I reformatted the disks to 512 bps an ran wipe on them (http://wipe.sourceforge.net/)
TIA,
Bert Kiers XS4All UNIX systeembeheerder, suspected terrorist