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Does DBAN just lifespan?

I got a new SSD that I will use as my boot drive, so I decided to delete everything off my 1tb WD hard drive. A person recommended DBAN to me, so I started the process with DoD short. But being the naive person that I am, I didn't do any research, and I found a thread made by another person that said this was overkill and it hurts my hard drive and it will decrease it's lifespan. Is this true, and if it is, how bad will the damage be? I included a picture, and it says it will take 7 hours. It's too late now, I tried to stop it and launch windows but it didn't work, so now I can only hope for the best.

20181018_195451.jpg

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SSDs have a finite number of write cycles so it can decrease the lifespan of the drive when you use those methods of erasure. There are better methods out there to erase an SSD. Many manufacturers have their own utility that allows you to securely erase the drive without writing random data to it.

 

You could stop DBAN by power cycling but there is a risk of corrupting the drive. I have done this a couple times before with spindle drives and not had an issue but I have not tried with an SSD so I couldn't tell you if it would make a difference. If it were me I would power cycle to stop the wipe and take the chance of corrupting the drive. But you should decide for yourself.

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16 minutes ago, BloodyGlitch said:

said this was overkill and it hurts my hard drive

Nonsense.

Your HDD will not be harmed by DBAN. I wouldn't use it on your SSD however, that is a very bad idea, but for normal spinner drives it's perfectly fine.

(source: I did data recovery professionally for years and DBAN was part of my toolkit)

NOTE: I no longer frequent this site. If you really need help, PM/DM me and my e.mail will alert me. 

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3 minutes ago, Razor Blade said:

SSDs have a finite number of write cycles so it can decrease the lifespan of the drive when you use those methods of erasure. There are better methods out there to erase an SSD. Many manufacturers have their own utility that allows you to securely erase the drive without writing random data to it.

 

You could stop DBAN by power cycling but there is a risk of corrupting the drive. I have done this a couple times before with spindle drives and not had an issue but I have not tried with an SSD so I couldn't tell you if it would make a difference. If it were me I would power cycle to stop the wipe and take the chance of corrupting the drive. But you should decide for yourself.

You are mistaken, I bought a new SSD so I am deleting everything from my old hard drive, which is a 1tb WD one.

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5 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

Nonsense.

Your HDD will not be harmed by DBAN. I wouldn't use it on your SSD however, that is a very bad idea, but for normal spinner drives it's perfectly fine.

(source: I did data recovery professionally for years and DBAN was part of my toolkit)

I see, but is there an easier way to delete everything from a hard drive for future reference? I only wipe for my own self, I do not sell hard drives.

 

Also, it says I am doing 3 cycles, so if I stop when cycle two starts, is this enough or should I let it finish completely?

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Just now, BloodyGlitch said:

You are mistaken, I bought a new SSD so I am deleting everything from my old hard drive, which is a 1tb WD one.

Ah okay yeah for some reason I thought it was a 1TB SSD. If you're not selling your old HDD then yes DBAN is way overkill and a simple Windows format would have been fine. However it isn't really going to damage a spindle drive. It will put stress on it but nothing a healthy spindle drive can't handle.

There's no place like ~

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Problems and solutions:

 

FreeNAS

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Dell Server 11th gen

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

ESXI

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Don't DBAN SSDs. It's not a good idea and will quickly rip through an SSD's lifespan.

 

DBAN works by writing random patterns to the disk, ignoring partitions and filesystems and all that jazz. It's perfectly safe (and might extend some life of the drive in some very limited cases, but those are rare).

 

1 minute ago, BloodyGlitch said:

I see, but is there an easier way to delete everything from a hard drive for future reference? I only wipe for my own self, I do not sell hard drives.

 

If you're just concerned about cleaning a disk up, I keep Ubuntu around so I can use the ATA Secure Erase, or you can remove all partitions on the disk with Disk Management and create one partition doing a non-quick format operation (this writes zeros to every block that the partition spans).

 

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8 hours ago, BloodyGlitch said:

I see, but is there an easier way to delete everything from a hard drive for future reference? I only wipe for my own self, I do not sell hard drives.

Format ?

NOTE: I no longer frequent this site. If you really need help, PM/DM me and my e.mail will alert me. 

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If you are going to use an HDD yourself, there is no need to wipe it, especially with something as drastic as DBAN. A simple reformat will be adequate.

 

If you are going to discard, sell, or give away the drive and it has data you would not want anyone else to access, then use a wiping program that allows you to use a single pass to wipe the drive. Before I got rid of all my HDDs and went all SSDs, I used CCleaner's wiping function, which uses a minimum of three passes (even three passes is overkill on modern HDDs but that was the lowest number CCleaner would do). Wiping will not measureably reduce the life of an HDD but anything more than a single pass is just a waste of time.

 

SSDs, on the other hand, should never be wiped (i.e. witing ones and zeroes to obliterate data by overwrting it). Secure Erase will not noticably reduce write life. Most SSDs come with utiliies that will include Secure Erase or PartedMagic can be used.

Jeannie

 

As long as anyone is oppressed, no one will be safe and free.

One has to be proactive, not reactive, to ensure the safety of one's data so backup your data! And RAID is NOT a backup!

 

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