StarTech Standalone Hard Drive Eraser And USB 3.0 Dock Capsule Review
by Billy Tallis on February 16, 2016 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- USB 3.0
- SATA
- DAS
- StarTech.com
Final Words
The StarTech Standalone Hard Drive Eraser and USB 3.0 Dock's feature set is great, and there are no obvious omissions. All of its features are easy to use and as self-explanatory as can be expected from a screen that only shows two lines of text; no manual is needed, but a one-page leaflet further clarifies how to use the device.
The dock's performance is functional, but disappointing. The USB dock capability is clearly a secondary concern. It's fast enough to mostly keep pace with a mechanical hard drive, but its performance with a solid state drive is much worse than we would have expected based just on the SATA 2 and USB 3.0 speed limits. Its random access performance is particularly bad and clearly much worse than some external SSDs we've tested that are also using USB to SATA bridge chips. This isn't a device anyone should consider as their primary external storage interface. In the context of data security it is sufficient for inspecting what's on a drive or perhaps for re-imaging after wiping. If you don't need to erase drives routinely, you can get higher-performing docks for a fraction of the cost: this dock has a MSRP of $283.99 compared to only $71.99 for a StarTech USB 3.1 dock that supports 6Gbps SATA and UASP.
As a hard drive eraser, the performance is also a concern. Despite sustaining over 200MB/s of writes over USB, its full-drive overwrite modes only wipe drives at 125MB/s. In some cases this won't matter, as a big drive might need to be left as an overnight job either way, but issuing the same write command with an incremented logical block address shouldn't be hard. It seems likely that the FPGA is being used to implement a processor core that just isn't fast enough; it also seems like that processor is getting in the way for the USB mode when the SATA commands should be passed directly to the drive. Fortunately, the dock is equipped to receive firmware updates, so StarTech might be able to improve things. If the time taken to wipe a hard drive is not a concern, then the eraser dock is a very convenient turnkey solution. If you have to process a very large number of drives and especially if you have to image large batches of drives, a computer with multiple hot-swap bays will be preferable.
The one mode where I have no performance complaints is also the mode I actually need. Performing an ATA Secure Erase under Windows is inconvenient at best and frequently impossible. With the addition of a hot-swap bay to our SSD testbed PC, what had been the most ridiculously complicated step of the test procedure is now foolproof and fast. With a minimum of ten erases per drive needed for our client drive test suite, the eraser dock is a very welcome tool and it's just about perfect for this use case.
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Teknobug - Tuesday, February 16, 2016 - link
I had a pile of SCSI and ATA and some earlier SATA drives to a place to have them recycled, they told me it's $250 and better off just smashing them with a hammer- I shook my head at that advice and just left them sitting in the garage, even when formatting them they still have bits of data that people can retrieve and it's not worth paying $250 to recycle them.Camikazi - Tuesday, February 16, 2016 - link
I just take them apart when not busy and use the platters for decoration and other things. I'm sure someone somewhere can still get info from it if they really wanted too but I'm sure there are easier ways to get the info they are looking for.Beany2013 - Tuesday, February 16, 2016 - link
3.5" platters make excellently coasters for mugs.Horribly slippery and slidey, but very pretty.
Murloc - Wednesday, February 17, 2016 - link
do you really have secret data on them that is worth at least hundreds of dollars in work?duartix - Tuesday, February 16, 2016 - link
Do they sell a secure eraser to securely erase the secure eraser's log of secure erases?BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, February 16, 2016 - link
And if they do, what happens when you need to securely erase the secure eraser log eraser?Azethoth - Wednesday, February 17, 2016 - link
This is already built in. You choose the paper option and attach a large metal garbage can to print out into. When you need to erase you just burn it at night out in the parking lot. It provides heat for the hobos and in the morning you pour water in as the second erase cycle. Then you mulch that into your grass and flower beds and observe it 24/7 with security cameras just to be sure.a1exh - Tuesday, February 16, 2016 - link
I built one of these for OCZ UK (which at the time was Oxford Semiconductors) in 2005 using the OXUF931S. The BOM would have been far less than this. No DDR. No Xilinx chip. I2C eInk display. Just a USB->SATA bridge running custom firmware. While very useful here at work, when I suggested selling them I was told there was no market for them. I cannot imagine anything has changed.jardows2 - Tuesday, February 16, 2016 - link
The article got me thinking about a software solution. Looks like there are lots of utilities for "secure erase" but not all claim to be "certified." Anyone have experience with software solutions?Holliday75 - Tuesday, February 16, 2016 - link
Killdisk was used at my last job as a tech for a very large data hosting company. We used KD on most servers and servers considered to house high business impact data was physically destroyed using a shredder. During large decommission projects I would cry at the site of watching thousands of 300gb SAS drives being tossed into the chipper.