"John Stoffel" john.stoffel@taec.toshiba.com writes:
It's a calculated trade-off. We assume that NetApp does the right thing and crunches the disks once they have done a failure analysis back in their labs.
Or sanitizes them before re-using them if they decide they are not actually broken after all.
I am (fairly) confident that NetApp do have sensible procedures for this sort of thing. I couldn't find a specific policy statement by them on this subject in a quick trawl round their web sites, though.
There's also the possibility of theft (or accidental loss) in transit, of course.
As a counter question, what do you do when you upgrade disk shelves and disks? Do others just trash all 14 72gb disks in a DS14 shelve when you upgrade to 144gb disks? Ouch...
When passing old disks on for use in other systems locally, or trading them in to NetApp, I zero them first. ("disk sanitize" is more recent than the last time, and anyway we aren't actually licensed for it yet.) If a disk that was out of maintenance failed before it could be zeroed ... hmmm, I suppose I would have to investigate the crusher / giant magnet / blast furnace techniques!