Securely erase Drives on Synology NAS

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 thoughts on “Securely erase Drives on Synology NAS”

  1. 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.

    1. 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

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