Seagate not honouring hard drive that's 'out of warranty'.

B0bbyEwing

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81896627#Comment_81896627

What size drive did you wipe & how long did it take?

I'm hoping the 2 years won't be up by the time it finished wiping 😂

mta999

overwrite it once with zeros or random data and data will not be recoverable except by very (very) expensive methods and even then probably not.

This is free

https://sourceforge.net/projects/eraser/

B0bbyEwing

Thanks for the info.

Again, any idea of duration on an 8TB drive?

All I'm really finding is "long time".

5 minutes is a long time to a dying man.

victor2

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81896959#Comment_81896959

I did a 4TB drive with DBAN and left it overnight. It did take all night on a moderate setting from what I remember! That was on a SATA connection, not USB.

debitcardmayhem

I would imagine, how long is the piece of string? depends how badly the device is damaged, retries , re-allocation of dodgy sectors, whether it causes the write to fail fatally.

A long time is the best guess 😂

MattMattMattUK

You are being paranoid, even more so as the drive is failing. Unless the data on the drive is unencrypted and highly sensitive. Just format it and send it back.

JSmithy45AD

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81896997#Comment_81896997

And if it is sensitive then a ball peen hammer is quicker and more secure.

MattMattMattUK

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81897050#Comment_81897050

It depends on the definition of secure. Even just using the Windows quick format option it would take at least a week to recover data from an 8TB hard drive. If the DFS or MFT are not recoverable then rebuilding 8TB of data from the file fragments would take months even on a workstation CPU, it is the kind of thing commercial data recovery providers or law enforcement use racks of servers for and it still takes a long time.

To many people get paranoid about the ability of bad actors to recover data from formatted drives, the reality is it is never going to be worth their effort when they can fairly easily get people to just hand them credit card and banking information anyway.

B0bbyEwing

Well if they don't try to see what was ever on the drive then there's no issue.

If they do then considering I'm not hurting anyone & it's only costing my own time I'll go ahead & wipe it.

Exodi

noitsnotme

Did that not require them to commit fraud by not declaring the drives at customs on arrival back in the UK? If they had declared, or been caught, they would have been lumped with VAT and duty.

MyRealNameToo

They've not declared their imports else they would have had to pay 20% VAT plus duty, if they paid what they have to probably wouldnt be.

To be fair, if you read the original thread, the OP states they did pay tax and duty on them (and they've included all of the values in their post):

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1rb9ot4/decided_to_fly_to_the_us_to_buy_some_hard_drives/

As someone who is into electronics, there's definitely a significant difference in pricing between the UK (and EU) compared to the US, even after considering tax. For example, it is relatively common on high end laptops to import from the US (through Amazon, who provide their own warranty), as the saving can be substantial.

I generally put it down to economies of scale/purchasing power of the US, but it could also be as MyRealNameToo mentions, the US don't need to price in pesky 'consumer rights' into their costings.