Set up my disk wiping station today. Cost... $0

**kss** · 02-14-2020, 06:04 PM

One of the PCs I found recently (its a core 2 duo, 2.93ghz) is not really good enough to sell as is, so it was going to be scrapped or turned into something. I decided this would be the one to make a wiping rig out of. The motherboard (with no OS hardrive or CD rom plugged in) has 7 sata ports. It has 4GB ram in it which is plenty, I might even take one of the 2GB sticks out and just run off 2GB. I will just run DBAN off a bootable USB thumbdrive that I had laying around. I have this setup with a keyboard/mouse/monitor, all of which were curb finds, and all on a kart with wheels/electric ran to it (like classrooms used to have for overhead projectors), which I also found on the curb.

Now I can start wiping drives efficiently and quickly.

**mikeinreco** · 02-14-2020, 07:06 PM

Look forward to you buyers thread

**Bluelou** · 02-14-2020, 07:08 PM

Sounds awesome.let us no how it works out for you . Best part is the price FREE

**kss** · 02-14-2020, 07:18 PM

Originally Posted by mikeinreco

Look forward to you buyers thread

LOL... no..... no no.

**hills** · 02-14-2020, 07:24 PM

I like to keep the HDD's i'm working on outside of the box. That way everything is sitting on the workbench.

This is hard to describe, but i used a switching power supply salvaged out of one of my scrap computers and hotwired it. There are better videos on how to hotwire a PSU but this one gives the basics.

Next i used a USB to HDD adapter like this one from WalMart.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/AGPtek-NE...SABEgIBJfD_BwE

The ac/dc power adapters that come with the kit are notoriously unreliable so just chuck it and use the benchtop power supply you made instead. All you need is the USB to HDD adapter anyway.

The main reason i had to do it this way is so that i could hotswap in a windows environment.

It might be a whole lot easier to hotswap inside the box with Linux.

Anyway ... have fun on your new adventure K.

A drive wiping rig is a great tool to have in the shop.

**kss** · 02-14-2020, 08:17 PM

Originally Posted by hills

I like to keep the HDD's i'm working on outside of the box. That way everything is sitting on the workbench.

This is hard to describe, but i used a switching power supply salvaged out of one of my scrap computers and hotwired it. There are better videos on how to hotwire a PSU but this one gives the basics.

Next i used a USB to HDD adapter like this one from WalMart.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/AGPtek-NE...SABEgIBJfD_BwE

The ac/dc power adapters that come with the kit are notoriously unreliable so just chuck it and use the benchtop power supply you made instead. All you need is the USB to HDD adapter anyway.

The main reason i had to do it this way is so that i could hotswap in a windows environment.

It might be a whole lot easier to hotswap inside the box with Linux.

Anyway ... have fun on your new adventure K.

A drive wiping rig is a great tool to have in the shop.

Yea I have a bunch of long sata cables out of some servers and various pcs and some sata power extender cables, so I can keep all the drives just laying on the shelf next to the wiping PC on the cart from the pic, and still plugged in. At least thats the plan..... has not been tried out yet

**hills** · 02-14-2020, 09:25 PM

I like your rig. Thanks for adding the pic.

The main problem that i ran into was that i needed to shut down the PC before adding an additional HDD to the mainboard. When the machine boots back up, bios has to detect the additional hard drive and adjust accordingly.

After that, it sometimes tries to boot from the other HDD ... especially if it has an operating system of some kind on it already.

Alternatively, when i connect a new HDD via an external usb port ... it's treated as a usb device. It's easy to hotswap in and out as needed.

I don't have a lot of cash invested in my rig. I think it was around 13.00 $ for the HDD ---> USB adapter. All the rest was built from scrap.

**kss** · 02-14-2020, 09:34 PM

Originally Posted by hills

I like your rig. Thanks for adding the pic.

The main problem that i ran into was that i needed to shut down the PC before adding an additional HDD to the mainboard. When the machine boots back up, bios has to detect the additional hard drive and adjust accordingly.

After that, it sometimes tries to boot from the other HDD ... especially if it has an operating system of some kind on it already.

Alternatively, when i connect a new HDD via an external usb port ... it's treated as a usb device. It's easy to hotswap in and out as needed.

I don't have a lot of cash invested in my rig. I think it was around 13.00 $ for the HDD ---> USB adapter. All the rest was built from scrap.

As far as trying to boot off drive you plug in, when you boot the computer up, start hitting the f12 key a bunch of times (or f8 or f10, it'll tell you on the screen) to get into the BIOS. You can. Then switch your boot order. So for example on mine I have the USB drive as the first thing in the boot order so even if I plug in 7 drives all with os's on them, it'll always do the USB boot first. You should be able to do this with your primary harddrive too.

Isn't it too slow doing them over USB? And yes I don't think you can hot swap via sata unfortunately... But in my case I can do 7, wait till all done, boot down, hook up 7 more, and boot up again.... Which is probably the safest anyway ... Probably don't want to be poking around the powersupply/mobi while powered on....

I do think there may be some pci cards that can support hot swapping sata drives ... I'd have to look into it though and it probably isn't worth it at my current volume (which is very very low for now)

**hills** · 02-14-2020, 10:16 PM

I have done a few by connecting directly inside the box but i can't remember specifically why. Don't recall any particular speed difference between that and USB2.

I have noticed a considerable difference with USB 3 and compatible devices running at 6Gbps.

Sadly, there don't seem to be very many of those devices entering the waste stream just yet. It's mostly just HDD's running at the 3Gbps limit. The bottleneck may be with the drives themselves. They can only go so fast.

ETA:

Thinking about it: I did upgrade my box to 16gb ddr3 along with a Q9650 Core 2 quad processor and an SSD. The hardware should up to the task but it just seems to take awhile to wipe a drive. I guess the drive just has to meander along at it's own pace ?

**kss** · 02-14-2020, 11:05 PM

Originally Posted by hills

I have done a few by connecting directly inside the box but i can't remember specifically why. Don't recall any particular speed difference between that and USB2.

I have noticed a considerable difference with USB 3 and compatible devices running at 6Gbps.

Sadly, there don't seem to be very many of those devices entering the waste stream just yet. It's mostly just HDD's running at the 3Gbps limit. The bottleneck may be with the drives themselves. They can only go so fast.

ETA:

Thinking about it: I did upgrade my box to 16gb ddr3 along with a Q9650 Core 2 quad processor and an SSD. The hardware should up to the task but it just seems to take awhile to wipe a drive. I guess the drive just has to meander along at it's own pace ?

I have a USB adapter. I am going to time wiping the same drive with 3 pass overwrite. Once via the usb adapter, once direct attached over sata. Just curious what the results will be. The usb adapter I have is usb 2.0 which will max out about 40MB/s. The sata I think I have is sata 1 which could be around 150MB/s so I expect it to be around 3x faster (or even more faster if its sata 2/3). A real world experiment is in order!

**hills** · 02-15-2020, 07:28 AM

I was curious so i attempted it myself. Bit out of my depth with speeds but my surface scan software reports speed. USB connection was reporting an average of 1900Mb/Min -or- 31.6 Mb/Sec.

I tried connecting the HDD internally, but try as i might, i simply couldn't seem to convince the BIOS not to attempt to boot from that drive.

**matador** · 02-15-2020, 06:52 PM

If you're using the SATA on the motherboard, a couple of tips:

First, extension cables are absolutely lovely, but they create a spaghetti mess fast. I'd take some cheap wood scraps or thick cardboard and duct tape (And I wonder why people call me a redneck, right?) and set up as many "bins" for the hard drives. You have plenty of space on the sides there, so you can eliminate some clutter.

Also, I wouldn't try wiping seven at once- it sounds like you're not running Secure Erase, so the risks I talked about last week mean nothing. But still, a computer that locks up is just no fun. I'd start with three or four drives, see how she does, and then add another one, and see how she does, and so on....

Also, if you're going to be wheeling that thing around, I'd go even more redneck and drill a hole into the monitor base through the PC case, so your monitor doesn't end up flying off and breaking. Don't ask me how I know about that

(Fortunately, I only totaled a 15" Gateway monitor so no big loss anyways)

Looks like a good setup. The nice thing is that if your PC ever dies, you can just unhook it and slap another one in there!

**kss** · 02-15-2020, 07:13 PM

Originally Posted by matador

If you're using the SATA on the motherboard, a couple of tips:

First, extension cables are absolutely lovely, but they create a spaghetti mess fast. I'd take some cheap wood scraps or thick cardboard and duct tape (And I wonder why people call me a redneck, right?) and set up as many "bins" for the hard drives. You have plenty of space on the sides there, so you can eliminate some clutter.

Also, I wouldn't try wiping seven at once- it sounds like you're not running Secure Erase, so the risks I talked about last week mean nothing. But still, a computer that locks up is just no fun. I'd start with three or four drives, see how she does, and then add another one, and see how she does, and so on....

Also, if you're going to be wheeling that thing around, I'd go even more redneck and drill a hole into the monitor base through the PC case, so your monitor doesn't end up flying off and breaking. Don't ask me how I know about that

(Fortunately, I only totaled a 15" Gateway monitor so no big loss anyways)

Looks like a good setup. The nice thing is that if your PC ever dies, you can just unhook it and slap another one in there!

All good tips! Thanks! Currently... I do not even have 7 drives to even try to wipe. I may be putting the cart before the horse with setting this up, but figured I had the stuff and the time so I got it ready. I dont usually even get that many drives, in fact most of the ones I get are old/ide ones that I just rip the board off of and dont wipe (so that I can sell the boards as scrap and the drive w/o boards also as scrap)..... But I am hoping to start getting more sata/good drives soon, and can begin wiping them since the last set of drives I sent off I didnt bother wiping (for 2 reasons, one some of them I knew the guy I was getting them off of and he said there was nothing on there he was concerned about, no personal info.... and I didnt at the time have a way to wipe the other ones other than usb which would have taken way too long, at least the way I was trying it.... ) but now Im all good to go.