TerraMaster Forum

Dear all

I am on TOS6, latest beta version. I have launched an erase of 1 of my Hard drive, not realizing that "secure erase" meant that the nas would take so long to erase my 10tb hard drive. Is there a way to stop secure erase without blocking the hard drive ?
I have seen in another post that a precedent user had "hot removed" its hard drive and that it was not accessible afterwards.

Many thanks in advance

I don't believe you can easily stop a secure erase safely. The point being that secure erase 'should' lock the drive while in progress to prevent unauthortised interuption and access to the drive. While your system might be in a secure location, not every system is and accidents do happen.

Many thanks Gremlin for your answer.

I am really annoyed that there was no warning of the duration before launching the "secure erase" function. Duration is shared only when it is too late. And not anyone is supposed to know what terramaster mean by "secure erase", especially as there is no regular "format" option available!
Secure erase of my 10tb hard drive will take something like 950 minutes.... and there is no indication on progress.

I have to say that I am disappointed so far by Terramaster support.

'Secure erase' does come with certain varieties in that (when available) you can select to
write '1' to every bit
write '0' to every bit
write alternate '1' and '0' to every bit
plus select the number of passes to be made.

The point is it is going to write to every bit - and that can be long and tedious. I don't know what TM have chosen as method. I tend to do secure erase off the main machine. I have a hot swap caddy on one of my desktops. I also use 3rd party software to do that.

I suspect 'wipe' may be quicker (but 'less secure') although I am not cetain which versions of TOS that is available on. It's a fairly recent option in TOS.

yes but "wipe" does not erase system data, does it ?
i wanted precisely to erase all boot data from the HD to solve my "system disk" issue, that's why I did not select the "wipe" option

For me 'wipe' means clear the disk, as in delete all partitions. A 'wiped' disk could still be read by recovery software. 'secure erase' cannot be recovered.
The only issue with 'wipe', I think, is that might not clear all superblocks.