I had to erase an external hard drive, a WD My Book, because I had to return it due to defects. So I searched on the web how to do that on a Synology DS916+ NAS, but I could not easily find the solution. Therefore I did a more generic search how to do it under Linux, and came across the tool “shred” which I had used years ago for the last time.
I checked on my NAS, and the tool was readily available. So I ran the following command to securely erase the (external) hard drive:
shred /dev/sdq1
Hope this helps people who need to accomplish the same.
2 replies on “Securely erase Drives on Synology NAS”
If you run into permission problems, you may need to add `-f` and prefix the command with sudo. Then it proceeded to work for me. Added `-v` to see the progress.
Hey Ben.
Thanks for mentioning this. I was logged in as “root”, so I didn’t have to use “sudo” obviously.
But “
-f, --force” may have to be used on occasion (“change permissions to allow writing if necessary”).Kind regards,
Ralf