Drive Eraser 6.1.1 - Release notes:

Features:

  • Blancco Hardware Appliances with network support.
    • The Blancco Hardware appliances can now be booted in two modes: localMC (old mode, runs both Drive Eraser and Management Console on the same machine, no network connectivity) and externalMC (new mode, runs Drive Eraser only, offers network connectivity). The new mode allows to consume licenses from or send reports to a centralized location (MC installed on the network or Blancco Cloud).
    • Using a centralized location to store the licenses and reports makes sense especially if you have several hardware appliances. It requires less maintenance for the appliances and less machines to back up, it also allows an optimal usage of the MC user roles/authorities and shared/individual licenses.
  • "Cryptographic Erasure" standard.
    • There is a new erasure standard available: "Cryptographic Erasure". It executes a firmware command that replaces the encryption key located within the drive, this scrambles all the drive's content rendering the data nonsensical and irretrievable.
    • This erasure can be triggered on any drive (HDD, SSD, NVMe) that supports the Crypto Erase command. It achieves a very quick erasure (under one minute) independently of the drive type, interface or capacity.

Bug fixes/Improvements:

  • The UI settings on Hardware Appliance are now saved on the internal drive: any UI setting (language, keyboard layout, erasure standard/options, etc.) modified during the session will be "remembered" after rebooting the appliance.
    • This allows updating some of the default settings directly from the UI, without the need to predefine them via DECT.
  • A new booting parameter "flr=forced" is supported. It enforces a freeze lock removal during the booting phase. For the time being, this setting can be input only from the Drive Eraser splash screen by editing the booting parameters.
    • The freeze lock removal procedure always checks if the drive has a freeze lock before power cycling the machine. This setting enforces the power cycling and is useful to purge certain machines/drives e.g. Dell Precision 7510 with Samsung NVMe SM951/PM951, Apple MacBook Pro 11,1 with Apple SSD SD0128F, Dell Latitude 5280 with Toshiba SSD THNSNK256GVN8 M.2 2280.
  • A new erasure option is available: "Fail erasure if not supported" is a sub-setting of the "Erase remapped sectors" setting:
    • If not selected (default value), the erasure will always proceed on drives not supporting the erasure of remapped sectors.
    • If selected, the erasure will immediately fail on drives not supporting the erasure of remapped sectors.
    • This setting replaces the previous setting "Prevent erasure if not supported" (that also checked the support of remapped sectors erasure but simply blocked the erasure or allowed it to proceed).
    • With this setting, the support of remapped sectors erasure becomes either optional (lack of support does not fail the erasure) or mandatory (lack of support fails the erasure) for a quick identification of drives lacking this support.
    • If the drive does not support the erasure of remapped sectors, there will always be a message in the report ("Drive doesn't support remapped sectors erasure"). This setting is available from both the Drive Eraser UI and the DECT(v2.1.1 or higher).
  • The maximum value of the MC communication timeout has been increased from 2 minutes (120 seconds) to 10 minutes (600 seconds).
    • Having a long timeout is required in special cases such as when erasing remotely 500+ machines, as each machine will attempt to communicate with the Management Console. This setting is only available from DECT (v2.1.1 or higher).
  • Fix for a problem where an uncaught network exception produced instabilities in the system. These instabilities were noticeable when erasing a large amount of drives (100+).
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