6.9.4 Decommissioning (wiping) Disks

February 9th, 2026

RBAC required: bear: Physical storage configuration

Disks which have been in use but are no longer part of a file system present two problems:

• A disk with data on it cannot be re-used to create a new file system or be added as a member of a RAID array.
• Data remaining on a disk may pose a security or compliance risk.

For this reason, BEAR provides a simple tool for making disks usable again or wiping the data on them in in a way that adheres to strict security best practices.

Only disks without mounted file system are available for decommissioning. You cannot decommission a disk in-use by mistake.

1. From the Admin Tools menu, select Physical Storage and activate the Decommission tab.

2. From the Device dropdown menu, select the disk to decommission.
3. From the Wipe type dropdown, select from one of the following:

• Fast: overwrites the first few megabytes of the disk with zeros. This effectively makes the disk appear like a new unused device and will break any file system on the disk. It may be possible to recover data manually from the rest of the disk using specialised tools.
• British HMG Infosec Standard 5, Baseline Standard: Writes zeros to every block on the disk completely destroying all data. This may take several hours to complete but data is not recoverable without highly specialised equipment.
• British HMG Infosec Standard 5, Enhanced Standard: Writes random data followed by zeros to every block on the disk completely destroying all data. This may take several hours to complete but data is not recoverable by any known means.

4. Click Decommission to start the decommission background job.

Decommissioning a RAID device will automatically apply the chosen wipe type to each disk in the array and destroy the array by returning the individual disks back the system as blank unused disks.