hardware for formatting drives?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Steve Burns
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Steve Burns

Is there specific hardware available to simply format a hard drive? I
do volunteer work at Web Innovations and Technology Services in St
Louis. http://www.witsinc.org In a good week, we need to format a
hundred or more drives. It is getting tedious to mount a drive in a PC
and run fdisk and format c:. it is also getting real boring waiting a
long time for large drives to complete. Surely drive manufacturers have
something easier and faster?

Thanks,
 
I hope you don't mean the DOS format command, it will not wipe a disk.

There are machines to clone disks, they are just PCs with a lot of IDE ports.

You probably need to write a multi-threaded wipe program, or use "dd if=zero
of=hdX &" on Linux.

"Steve Burns boeing.com >" <"stephen.d.burns2 <at> wrote in message
| Is there specific hardware available to simply format a hard drive? I
| do volunteer work at Web Innovations and Technology Services in St
| Louis. http://www.witsinc.org In a good week, we need to format a
| hundred or more drives. It is getting tedious to mount a drive in a PC
| and run fdisk and format c:. it is also getting real boring waiting a
| long time for large drives to complete. Surely drive manufacturers have
| something easier and faster?
|
 
Previously Steve Burns said:
Is there specific hardware available to simply format a hard drive? I
do volunteer work at Web Innovations and Technology Services in St
Louis. http://www.witsinc.org In a good week, we need to format a
hundred or more drives. It is getting tedious to mount a drive in a PC
and run fdisk and format c:. it is also getting real boring waiting a
long time for large drives to complete. Surely drive manufacturers have
something easier and faster?
Click to expand...

You do not need to mount them inside the case. But you are limited
by the drive bandwidth. There is no way around it. However
MS-Format will not clean the disk. Linux

dd_rescue /dev/zero /dev/hd<drive letter>

e.g. with knoppix from CD will and give you anice progress
report. You can also do this to several disks in parallel.

Arno
 
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