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I have 2x 2TB drives running RAID-1 and plan on upgrading to 3TB drives... do I need to take any special steps to nuke the data if I am selling them separately or should a standard format be safe since im assuming striped drives are impossible to read on their own anyways?
If it's RAID-1, it's not striped and is probably fairly easy to read. I'd at least write 0s to the drives (and probably would use a tool to write 0s, 1s, and back multiple times).
thats right i got the 2 mixed up... so even if a non striped RAID-1 drive is unreadable from a normal mount i should still do a full wipe...
heres the drives im thinking of getting: $140 for 3TB http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...eId=1&name=3TB
Honestly, even a RAID 0 (or 5 or otherwise striped RAID) I would still write 0s to it before selling. The size of a stripe could very well be large enough that interesting chunks of data could be pulled. I think it's doubtful that anyone would bother, but it's easy enough to wipe the drive well that you might as well.
A single zero should be sufficient. Shouldn't take too long.
If you really are freaked out about it, boot to a linux CD and run "shred" on the drive. It will take forever, but you will definitely not be able to recover any data with conventional means.