Using disk sanitization to remove data from spare disks
Applies to
- ONTAP 9.5 and earlier
- ONTAP 8 Cluster Mode
- ONTAP 8 7-Mode
- Disk sanitization of spare drives
Description
Disk sanitization enables you to remove data from a disk or set of disks so that the data can never be recovered.
Before you begin
- The disks that you want to sanitize must be spare disks; they must be owned but not used in an aggregate.
About this task
- When disk sanitization is enabled on a storage system, it cannot be disabled again.
- If you need to remove data from disks using Storage Encryption, do not use this procedure. Use the procedure for destroying data on disks using Storage Encryption.
NOTE: Do not turn off the storage system, disrupt the storage connectivity, or remove target disks while sanitizing.
- If sanitizing is interrupted during the formatting phase, the formatting phase must be restarted and allowed to finish before the disks are sanitized and ready to be returned to the spare pool.
- If you need to abort the sanitization process, you can do so by using the
disk sanitize abort
command. - If the specified disks are undergoing the formatting phase of sanitization, the abort does not occur until the phase is complete.
- At that time, ONTAP displays a message telling you that the sanitization process was stopped.