Some people do like period accurate drives. Also, my mom's old pc is equipped with a 500GB harddisk and we're not spending money on a fresh ssd just to be able to sell it in working order. _That_ is the reason for this short. People destroying harddrives juist to safely sell their old pc's.

@ex-itguy that's fair, I guess I just didn't think people would start destroying perfectly good HDDs to sell a PC and would rely on either windows/mac built in reset functions or know enough to zero the drive out on their own if they cared that much about the data. But realistically, from an attacker's perspective, no one is gonna buy a 2nd hand computer just so they can do digital forensics hoping to find something juicy, and if they do find anything, it's likely either stuff they don't care about (personal photos/documents/files) or could have gotten fairly easily through other means/attack vectors (address, name, social, tax docs, etc). I mean it's a valid approach and should definitely be done if you care and want the peace of mind, but for 99.99% of people "reset this PC" is more than adequate

I agree, but I have seen people recommend that to others a lot, that's mainly why I decided to make this short. ;)

Awesome, thanks! You're sure it's not your board not providing the actual 4 lanes required to get full 3.4GBps? On the previous video I tested it in the M.2 slot of a mini pc. Turned out to only have 2 lanes connected to that slot (which I didn't know, and hence didn't question my other readings as well).

@@ex-itguy Ah good point. You made me think, but this nvme is actually directly in the nvme slot of my motherboard rather than on my nvme riser ... I think. I'd better open the case and look , it's been a while since I installed. My riser was sold as 4 lanes and has the right number of connections going to motherboard but you never know when you only spend equivalent of $10

@@richards6269 well both very cheap X4 risers I bought have 4 lanes connected, but your board might just not provide 4 lanes to the slot (I have even heard of only 1 lane available on an X16 slot). The mini pc I tested seems to have just 2 lanes connected to the actual M.2 slot. Should be in your board's manual by the way.

@@ex-itguy Yup another good point . The board/cpu should provide 4 lanes to the slot but you never know. I'll see if I can query that. I do suspect the nvme is the bottleneck though as it's an old 256Gb.

That's not true. have you tried it recently? It took about 30 minutes a pass on a 12 year old 500GB drive.

Everything can be cracked or brute-forced. I wouldn't rely soly on encryption if there's real sensitive data on it. But for most people that should be fine indeed.

There's a mistake in this video, my system only had PCIe 2.0 slots. That's why I did a follow up to retest. On 2.0 an X1 is slower than SATA. On 3.0 it's slightly faster, but not much.

Where's the exit? Run!

Ouch! Maybe get a cheap/free pc from some marketplace and test it on that first, just to be sure?

Dubbel. Ik kan er ook niet zoveel mee, maar vind het wel geinig dat iets als dit bestaat. :) Toen ik een jaar of 20 terug in een computerwinkel werkte zette ik het nogal eens op winkelsystemen en had ik nog hoop dat het wel wat zou worden. Die hoop is er nog steeds maar rationeel gezien is de kans vrij klein. :)

@@ex-itguy Tja, het probleem is dat een besturings systeem pas als volwassen wordt gezien waneer kleuters er mee om kunnen gaan. Despite ik zie verbazingwekkend veel mensen met name met Linux werken, zonder dat daar enige interesse in ICT is. (ook blij dat ik geen ICTer meer ben, al zit ik wel in de hi-tech)

Mja, het probleem is natuurlijk vooral specifieke software. Als in "ik hem Ms Excel nodig voor mijn werk". Dan zit je vast aan Windows, eventueel MacOS. Dat spul draait ruk met Wine en macros gaan stuk in LibreOffice (zelf ervaring mee helaas... moet nog steeds eens kijken of ik die om kan bouwen...). Aan de andere kant is 95% blij met een fatsoenlijke browser...

@@ex-itguy Ja joh begrijp ik. Zelf gebruik ik veel software om chips te programeren. draait meestal op Windows (zou je denken) Linux en soms ook op Mac. Even een kijkje onder de moptorkap en je ziet allles UNIX based. Inmiddels wordt door chipfabrikanten voor oudere versies al Linux aangeraden (niet dat dit allemaal heilig is hoor) Office spul heb ik nooit nodig (documenten maak ik met LaTeX) dat scheeld natuurliik wel. Wel cool dat je op deze manier toch weer plezier beleefd aan het vak.

Office spul heeft vaak vooral te maken met het kunnen delen met collegae en klanten haha Ik gebruik zelf audio plugins met drm zooi die het daardoor alleen in Windows en macOS doen (daarom gebruik ik een Mac, want ik ben blij dat ik al een jaar of 15 Windows vrij ben). Blijf het wel proberen want van MacOS wordt ik ook niet altijd even vrolijk. Toevallig ben ik bezig met een video waarin ik laat zien dat Linux niet eng is, voor de verstokte Windows gasten die het toch eens willen proberen. Eens zien of we nog wat zieltjes kunnen winnen. ;-)

Yeah with bad sectors you should just destroy it. I thought it would be pretty obvious this is for drives in good condition...

Sorry I fail to see the relation with this short?

It's not indeed. Depending on your use case, Linux might be an option? I'm working on a video about Linux for Widows users right now. Showing some different distros and how to safely install it next to Windows so you can really test it while keeping your Windows install to fall back to.

Sure, I've got plenty of videos about that though ;)

Me too, but this is fun to play with from time to time :)

Yes, if you didn't wipe your whole MacOS install you can do that. 😉

That or a bootloader on another drive. I'll probably get into that another time.

I believe dban is quite old? Anyway this basically does the same and exists on all Linux distros.

Or let someone else do that, that's why you might wanna do this.

@ex-itguy if you program alot.. you are ganna want to keep that drive.. or do alot of photos.. or get that 1 TB game that no one wanted

Thanks!

Sorry what? 😄

The other one's were One Million Fatal Guns, and FlatOut.

@ex-itguy thank you!

Pretty cool idea, actually 😄

Thanks!

Hmm, I didn't thoroughly test it but I haven't seen those issues.

@@ex-itguy I found it would happen on 3 different MacBookPro12,1s after a few reboots between Windows and macOS

What do you mean? This doesn't take partitions and filesystems into account and just overwrites the whole disk.

Thanks! Yes it is, it was the only Gnome centered distro already on my stick so Gnome-disks was readily available.

@ex-itguy great distro and very reliable!!

Thanks! Note that the speeds in this video were on PCIe 2.0. I have corrected that mistake in the follow-up video.

@ex-itguy yes you did great job!!

Not really, MacOS is packed with software like iMovie, Office stuff, etc. But still a very large image given most Linux distros include about the same. Besides I wouldn't mind to only have the OS and get to choose which extras to download.

I didn't have sound issues at all, but others have mentioned cracking audio on these things. Was that your problem as well?

@@ex-itguy same one you had at the start where the devices show but don't seem to do anything - difference is i didn't fully install it before trying to sort out the sound and I couldn't get it working on the live environment so i gave up on it hahah

Yeah I get that. It is the advantage of a live environment that you can test things before installing, but fixing things is next to impossible.

Yeah it's not a great experience yet. Maybe it never will be, but I do like the effort they put into this.

Exactly

🦀

I'll try. I just took a few distros to show it mostly doesn't make a big difference.

@@ex-itguy it does tho, manjaro is reported to have a few problems and endeavour is really customized to offer a good experience even if it doesn't support flatpaks or snaps (which I think is a plus). Also for older machines consider using brave over firefox. I have a not so powerful laptop and brave works way better than firefox. firefox becomes very laggy with a few tabs opened and brave works amazing. to install progams you need to use the aur and pacman over the terminal but it's very easy. sudo yay -S brave-bin and you're set

@@ex-itguy Do you use linux or you just do it to show people that it can be done?

@alpacamale2909 I use it a lot, and have been for over two decades.

@@ex-itguy That's very nice. What I like about endeavour is that it is a very good starting point for an arch install and that it doesn't come with things that I consider bloat like snap or flatpak. it doesn't even come with a gui pacman installer which you don't really need tbh with yay and pacman over the terminal I can install pretty much everything.

Yeah this isn't ideal. I'll probably just plug a cheap ssd in this one instead.

smash: command not found

How'd you do that if I may ask?

@@ex-itguy It's a bios option on some motherboards. Not all though. It's likely an advanced option or advanced mode option.

That's "just another" Linux distro. This isn't. ;)

That's why I mentioned pin 1 haha Most cables I have had in my hand did have it though.

No, you can't properly test a mounted drive.

Just not fit the test. I re-testef because I made a mistake in this one, see my latest video. In that one I tested with the heatsink as well.

If your drive has bad blocks you have a solid reason to destroy it.

The background music? I have bought "Cinematic Soundwaves" a while ago, and usually just pick a few from that library. :)