Understanding Uninitializing in the HP P6000 Control Panel

[Lahann]

Hi, and thanks for taking your time to read this.

Here at our company we have recieved a HP rack with an HSV300 and two AG638B fiber channel enclosures. As our policy is to zero wipe all hard drives we sell, we needed to make sure we are wiping these fiber channel drives. 

So far:

Both controllers are connected to the FC enclosures. There are 8 FC drives in each enclosure. We hooked up a laptop with a ethernet cable to the management module, and connected to the HP p6000 control screen. We logged in and were able to view the drives in command view. Then we went back and chose the "Uninitialize Drives" option, and went ahead with it. "Operation Sucessful" immediatly pops up.

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I just wanted to know exactly how uninitialization works. Is it actually zeroing all the drives? Or is it a simple format? We cannot deem drives being "wiped" if they are not zeroed. 

Now if they are not being zeroed, is there any other possible way to wipe the drives? Fiber Channel is really different from the usual SATA and SAS drives....

Any other tips or wisdom is welcome. Have a nice day.  

[Keith-B]

The action of 'uninitializing' the storage system by Command View EVA is not a data destructive action and the disks are not 'wiped'.  This action serves only to deactivate the metadata instance that was the initialized storage system.  HPE PointNext offers a data sanitization service which can perform this task for you if desired.  

[Shaan_M]

Hi @Lahann,

As you mentioned it seems like a First time setup.

Uninitializing does remove the Table of Contents (Metadata) which makes the drive as good as zeroed/scratch drive as any data written to it further will wipe the existing data, if any.

As @Keith Mentioned, HPE PointNext offers a data sanitization service which can perform this task for you if desired for sanitizing the disks completely.

Regards
Shaan

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