Depends how it goes down, if a company goes into insolvency all security policies are off the table and random hardware can get shifted into lot bidding.
HDD can be written multiple times with random data if data centers really have to protect what their former customers wrote on them. I never looked at those details in standard contracts.
All you really need to do is write one pass of zeros on them. That will prevent anyone but a very dedicated adversary with expensive equipment from recovering any data, especially on TB scale drives.
Can still take hours per drive though, which is why a lot of people skip it.
I make a random 1MB chunk, then write that all over the drive, at overlapping offsets. I've been told that really clears it. On IDE-spinning-rust disks I trusted it, not sure if I should trust these modern SSD
A drive that supports Secure Instant Erase should be encrypting all data. When the SEI function is invoked (“nvme format -s 2”, “hdparm —-security-erase”) they key is thrown away and replaced with a new one. Similar implementations exist for NVMe, SATA, and SAS drives — regardless of whether they are HDD or SSD.
This puts a fair amount of trust and in the drive’s ability to really delete the old key.
My understanding is that refurbished GPUs from e.g. crypto mining are something people are warned away from, because they've often been run into the ground. Are AI usage practices different?
> My understanding is that refurbished GPUs from e.g. crypto mining are something people are warned away from, because they've often been run into the ground.
No, this wasn't the case. While there were never comprehensive studies various tech media purchased these cards to run testing and found that, other than scammers, they all performed to expectation.
Car tire is a moving part that wears in use. Only moving parts a GPU has are its fans, which can be replaced. The rest may last really long, or fail brand new.
Thermal cycling will eventually cause problems with continuity but I'm not sure that's really predictable. We have some really old GPUs that eventually had problems under load, we attributed it to thermal degradation as we had ruled out pretty much everything else.
> And when the AI bubble bursts, "refurbished" HDDs and GPUs will flood the market.
GPUs? No way. The datacenter cards don't even have video output ports, and I think the chips destined for AI / ML training also have everything video/render related removed from the silicon, makes for more yield.
And the other way around, using (cheap) consumer GPUs in servers, I think at least NVDA tries to prevent that with driver-based DRM, so there won't be any flooding coming from there either.
