[kwlug-disc] Don't do what I did...

[CrankyOldBugger]

So I have been (very slowly) wiping all of my old, unused hard drives so
that they would be ready for whatever may come in the future.

To do this, I was using "nwipe", which is a Linux equivalent of the old
Derick's Boot and Nuke (DBAN).  It is a very simple program.

Hardware-wise I was running the nwipe on a Raspberry Pi 4, with a USB
toaster drive bay device.  I've had this toaster for quite some time now.

I found that this setup works well as the Raspi isn't my main driver so it
can run in the background, and I only needed to occasionally look at it
over a KVM switch.  I've managed to go through a dozen drives so far with
no issues.  But then I started running into issues where my 3TB and 4TB
drives were reading at 2TB.  I thought maybe it was a limitation of the
Raspi.  After much duckduckduckgo'ing, I finally figured out (to my
embarrassment)  that my toaster is only 32 bit, thus a 2TB limit.

I went on Amazon and picked up a newer (USB3 as well) toaster and sure
enough, the larger drives were reading at their correct size.  Plus, with
the older USB2 toaster, I was getting a max of 30MB/s transfer; the newer
toaster gets me 80-90 MB/s.  So now the 4TB drives only take 3 days instead
of a week or so...

If you're the curious type, the new toaster is this one:
https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B01MTLMTL0/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
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