I have a Netgear ReadyNAS 316. The six bays are full with 4TB HDs. I want to replace them with 8TB HDs and sell the 4TB HDs. They all are Seagate 4TB NAS HDD SATA 6Gb/s NCQ 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive (ST4000VN000) bought on Amazon. Regardless of what the buyer intends to do with them do I have to reformat them or return them to factory settings? If I don't will the buyer be able to format the drives to his choosing? Thank you!
The buyer can format them however he wants, but if you will be selling them as a group you probably want to do at least a quick format to make it that much harder for the user to get at your data should he wish to. Though if you are replacing your disks one at a time, to expand then probably the only thing that could be accessed would be the 4GB OS volume anyway.
Some people would go further and use a tool like DBAN (included on the Ultimate Boot CD) to securely erase the disks. It really depends how sensitive the data is and what you want to do.
Seatools also can erase the drive securely (using the ATA command that all vendors now implement). It might not work with USB adapters though. Zeroing the drive once is sufficent btw.
You should erase them, otherwise you risk some leakage of personal information.
