Obligatory “asking for a friend”. But no, like, if enemies of your state were possibly going to overrun a data center you rent a spot at but you still have some time, what’s the quickest way to, remotely, absolutely ruin any of the data on the disks? I can remember seeing old IBM "Death"Stars with the magnetic medium stripped clean. Don’t necessarily need that blatant a result, but say you didn’t have enough time to know if a basic dd /dev/{zero,random,urandom} /dev/mraid0 could run long enough to overwrite everything even just once, let alone a few times.

Alternatively, is there a file system which is purpose built for this sort of thing, where you send the array some sort of panic code – and I’m not considering drive encryption with a hardware or software key, whereas even if they were in place they are external to the disks themselves and thus at risk from external factors, rather than there being some command I can send to, well, if not crash the heads, then otherwise completely unravel the data structure in an irretrievable way with just one or two commands?

  • HeckGazer
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    1 year ago

    If your threat model includes state actors, a head crash ain’t gonna cut it. If you want a rabbit hole to go down, check out data recovery videos on YouTube. They’re very insightful.

    Best choice would probably be to have every second rack slot be just a big bucket of gunpowder or powdered magnesium that you can set off with a relay