Older external drive enclosures

TidBITS Talk
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I have a few external drive enclosures that I haven’t used in a while. They are all good quality, one is OWC, I think one is G-technology, and I forget who made the other enclosure. Some are USB-2 + Firewire, I think the most recent is Firewire 3 (?). They are all wall powered and all have the drives inside. Given the port speeds and connectors on these enclosures, I’m wondering if they have any utility at all. I was thinking of simply pulling the drives and destroying them or trying to connect them to my old iMac and erasing them. Otherwise I cannot see their utility at this point.

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I agree that USB2/FW enclosures are not useful unless you have some old (e.g., PowerPC-era) Macs. Remove the drives and e-waste recycle the enclosures. Then either wipe/recycle the drive or put it in a more modern enclosure.

USB3+/Thunderbolt3 enclosures are still quite useful. Keep using it if you have a use for it. If you need a larger drive, you can usually swap out the internal drive for a newer/larger/faster one.

Definitely wipe old drives before giving them away unless you’re absolutely certain there’s nothing that could cause you problems if someone else were to access it.

The easiest way to wipe a drive it to use the command-line diskutil to write zeros (or random bytes) to the entire drive. The steps are going to be:

  • Connect the drive. Use the enclosure you’ve got. If the enclosure is broken or too slow, a basic USB3-SATA adapter can be used. I have one of these for this purpose: FIDECO SATA/IDE to USB 3.0 Adapter.

  • Identify its device name.

    • The easiest way is to use the graphical Disk Utility. Select the physical drive and look at the Device field:

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    • Alternatively, type diskutil list into a Terminal window and look for it. If it is formatted with HFS+ volumes, then you’ll see a physical device containing the volumes. If it’s formatted with APFS volumes, you’ll see a physical device with an APFS container and that container’s synthesized drive containing the volumes. For example, on my Mac:

      $ diskutil list
...
/dev/disk6 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *4.0 TB     disk6
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk6s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS Container disk7         4.0 TB     disk6s2

/dev/disk7 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +4.0 TB     disk7
                                 Physical Store disk6s2
   1:                APFS Volume Time Machine            3.3 TB     disk7s2

      In the above fragment of output, my Time Machine volume is on disk7, and its container is backed by disk6s2. You can also see that disk6 has a container that synthesizes disk 7. So this physical drive is disk6.

  • Eject/unmount all the volumes on the drive. The easiest way is to do this using the graphical Disk Utility. You can also use the diskutil unmountDisk command. Provide the device’s name (e.g., diskutil unmountDisk disk6)

  • Use one of these commands to erase it:

    • diskutil zeroDisk - write zeros to the entire disk. (e.g., diskutil zeroDisk disk6)
    • diskutil randomDisk - write random data to the entire disk. (e.g., diskutil randomDisk disk6). Although you can tell it to do this multiple times, once should be enough.
    • disktuil secureErase. Use either level 0 (zero-fill) or level 1 (random data). There is really no good reason for multi-pass erasure. (e.g., diskutil secureErase 0 disk6).

All of the above diskutil commands require your account to own the device. Which typically means that you must be logged in to an administrator account and use the sudo command to run it with root-level permissions.

e.g., instead of diskutil zeroDisk disk6, type sudo diskutil zeroDisk disk6, and type in your password when prompted.

Unfortunately, the graphical Disk Utility no longer has an option to zero-out or secure-erase a disk, so you need use use the command-line diskutil or a third-party tool.

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People in the Vintage Mac Reddit group would probably be interested. I found a use for older enclosures when I revived my MDD G4 last summer.

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Any tips on physically destroying old drives before discarding them? They seem to be built like a tank, and if there is a simple way to do this I’d prefer it over the hassle of trying to figure out how to hook up old tech for a wipe command. (And no, I don’t happen to have a strong electromagnet close at hand.)

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If encrypted, how about submerging them in a bucket of water? If not encrypted, maybe drilling through the platters/chips.

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