RMAing a large HDD that has pirated movies/games on it, is it necessary to completely zero the drive?
The manufacturer requires that the faulty HDD be sent back. It's 18 TB, so ShredOS estimates 100 hours to completely wipe the drive. I really would rather not go through that. Does anyone else have experience with this?
I'm pretty sure the oem is not hooking up every rma drive and looking for files.
"well, new rma drive? Let's pop it in the USB caddy and see what's there... Hmm, some files... jpgs... Mpegs... Oh look. Pdfs with embedded viruses. Good thing we didn't connect this drive to... Oops"
They're sending that thing straight to the industrial degausser and then certification for possible resale.
As company policy? No. But their employees are people too.
I used to work for a large ISP that shall remain nameless. The ISP abuse department absolutely DID look at every pub ftp they were told to shut down, and grabbed whatever they found interesting before shutting it down. There may even have been a massive MP3 share on one of their servers to store their ill-gotten gains.
Absolutely NOT company policy, but it happened.
But the question here is: should OP worry about his 'linux isos' getting him in trouble. Even accounting for overly curious employees, the answer is still NO.