14
Protecting Your Digital Assets
TM
CRU WiebeTech Drive eRazer Ultra User Manual
the drive and the Drive eRazer Ultra are fully seated, and do not attempt to move the drive, Drive eRazer
Ultra, or cables during the erase process. Make sure the drive has good air flow around it to avoid any pos
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sible heat issues. If you continue to see this error message on the drive, the next thing to try is changing
to Secure Erase Enhanced mode. This mode doesn’t use write commands; rather, it issues a single com
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mand to the drive that causes the drive to erase itself. This mode handles bad blocks better than modes
based on write commands. If none of these remedies work, the only way to ensure there are no recover
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able data remaining on the drive is to physically destroy it.
MY DEPARTMENT REQUIRES 100% VERIFICATION OF ERASURE. DOES THE “HIGH”
OPTION VERIFY 100% OF THE DRIVE?
No, although the “high” checks a large number of sectors of the drive, performing 100% verification would
require a much greater amount of time than the erasure process itself. For this reason, and for the security
of having an independent tool, we recommend using a 3rd party tool for 100% verification.
Many organizations actually require that the erase tool and the verification tool be separate products. The
Australian Government Information Security Manual, November 2010, states that “Verifying the sanitisation
of media with a different product to the one conducting the sanitisation process provides an independent
level of assurance that the sanitisation process was conducted correctly” (161).
If it satisfies your department’s requirements, you could use a hex editor, such as HxD, to visually inspect
the contents of the drive to verify that it was erased.
