Using Drive Utilities to clone or securely erase a drive on an ASUSTOR NAS

COURSE OBJECTIVES

Upon completion of this course you should be able to:

1. Use the empty drive bays of your NAS to securely erase a drive or clone data to a new drive.

PREREQUISITES

Course Prerequisites:

None

Students are expected to have a working knowledge of:

None

OUTLINE

1. Introducing Drive Utilities

1.1 Installing Drive Utilities

2. Cloning Drive Data

3. Securely Erase a Drive

1. Introducing Drive Utilities

ASUSTOR designs a variety of models with different numbers of drive bays to meet the different needs for storage capacity. Install Drive Utilities from App Central to use one or more empty drive bays to perform maintenance on hard drives including, but not limited to secure erasure of a drive and drive cloning.

System Requirements: AS31, 32, 52, 53, 54, 61, 62, 63, 64, Lockerstor, Lockerstor Gen2, Lockerstor Gen3, Lockerstor Pro, Flashstor, Flashstor Gen2, AS6004U, Xpanstor 4.

1.1 Installing Drive Utilities

• Using your Web browser, log in to ADM using an administrator account.
• Select [App Central] [ASUSTOR Apps].
• Click on [Drive Utilities] and press [Install].

2. Cloning Drive Data

By using two or more empty bays on an ASUSTOR NAS or the expansion unit, all data in one of the hard drives or SSDs can be completely copied to another hard drive or SSD of the same or greater capacity. This helps to retain and/or back up all data on a drive.

• To clone a drive, there must be at least two or more empty drive bays.
• Insert a source drive into one of the empty bays.
• Insert destination drive(s) into another bay. It is possible to clone data from one drive to multiple drives.

• Locate the [Drive Utilities] icon in the ADM desktop and click on it.

• To display available drives only, click Hide unavailable drives.

• Select the source drive and click Drive Cloning.

• All destination drives that are available are listed here.
• Select one or more destination drives and click Next.

• Confirm your settings and then click Finish.

• Once initiated, the current cloning progress will be displayed.
• The time required to complete the cloning will vary depending on the capacity and speed of inserted drive.

• Click Abort to abort a task. Incomplete clones may render data on destination drives unreadable.

• The status of the drive is as shown below when complete.

3. Securely Erase a Drive

When hard drives or SSDs are no longer needed, use the idle drive bays on your NAS or use an ASUSTOR expansion unit with Drive Utilities to securely erase data in a hard drive or SSD to prevent data recovery from unauthorized third parties.

• Make sure there is at least one empty bay on the NAS.
• Insert a drive that you want to secure erase into the empty bay.

• Locate the [Drive Utilities] icon in the ADM desktop and click on it.

• To display available drives only, click Hide unavailable drives.

• Select a drive for erasure. Click Secure Erase.

• Confirm and click OK.

• Enter your administrator password to initiate the task.

• Now you can see the current progress of data erasing on the main page.
• Times required to securely erase a drive varies on the capacity and speed of the drive.

• Click Abort to abort a task. Aborting prematurely means that there may still be recoverable data. Erased drives will need to be formatted to be used again.

• The status of the drive is as shown below when complete.