How to securely wipe your ReadyNAS

mdgm wrote:

If you do a secure delete of your files they would be gone. If you do a factory default with the drives in place that would make data recovery even more difficult (if it wasn't already impossible). If you're wanting to sell your drives (not with your NAS) you could hook them up to your PC and format them to use NTFS as I suggested earlier. Most people would assume, that they were connected to a Windows PC and wouldn't suspect they were formatted using the EXT3 filesystem

Well I just did a normal delete of most of my files using a mapped drive from a PC. These were the files that I was most concerned with as they contained backups of several systems with potentially some sensitive information. The files that I am deleting now using srm are ones I'm not so concerned with. (so perhaps I did this backwards).

I'm not opposed to using a PC to format my drives but if I can avoid it I would prefer not to. And I was thinking that there may be other ReadyNAS users out there who bought the same drives that I did and are looking for some spares so trying to hide their history would not work in that case.

So my question is whether srm will have any impact on the available free space where my previously deleted files potentially still exist. If it does then I think that, along with a factory reset would put my mind at ease. But if the free space is not overwritten securely then I need to find a way to do that.

StephenB wrote:
Vendor tools also allow you to write zeros to every sector of the drive.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by Vendor Tools. How would I go about doing that?