HP Dc7700 HP Disk Sanitizer, External Edition - Page 5

IMPORTANT It is strongly suggested that drives that are not to be erased be disconnected from the PC before running HP Disk Sanitizer, External Edition. If this application is booted from a USB drive, the USB drive will be detected as hard drive 0x80. Use caution when choosing which drive to delete. The best way to proceed is to disconnect all other drives except the drive to be erased in order to ensure that another drive is not accidentally erased. Please note that when choosing the "Erase All Drives" option, the software will automatically detect which disk is being booted from. If a user boots from a CD, all internal and external (USB) drives will be erased. However, if a user boots from a USB drive key, the first drive to be erased will be Drive 0x81. This is to ensure that the bootable USB drive key is not erased. RAID Configuration HP Disk Sanitizer, External Edition supports RAID configuration.  If two 80GB hard drives are used in mirrored mode (Raid 1), one 80GB hard drive will be detected, but both drives will be erased.  If two 80GB hard drives are used in striped mode (Raid 0), one 160GB hard drive will be detected, and both drives will be erased. In all cases, a small section of non-personal metadata used by the RAID controllers will remain on the hard drives. Maximum Speed It is important to keep in mind that no matter how quickly and efficiently the code can execute, the speed of writing to the hard drive is restricted by physical and mechanical limitations of the read and write heads. Even in the future, the CPU will be able to process and execute the application faster than the hard drive will ever be able to move the heads. So essentially, as soon as the program fills up the hard drive's write buffer, the speed at which the drive is written to will remain constant. Furthermore, this application performs one disk erase or verify at a time, providing status as the write or verification pass progresses across the drive. While multiple drives can be erased, each will increase the erasure time required. Preventing Data Loss When erasing a disk, HP strongly recommends that you disconnect all other hard drives from the system in order to prevent accidental loss of data.  If you boot the Disk Sanitizer utility from a USB drive, the USB drive will be detected as drive 0x80. Use caution when selecting which drive to delete and take note of the drive size displayed to avoid erasing the wrong drive. USB drives are typically less than 5GB.  If you use RAID mode, HP recommends that you change to IDE mode before running this utility. If you run this utility in RAID mode, there will be a small section of RAID metadata that will not be erased from the hard drive. This RAID metadata does not contain user data. 5