bofh2023

I'd personally feel a lot more comfortable if that drive was an SSD, not a spinning/mechanical one. Seems (and this is mostly gut feeling) like more can go wrong with mechanical drives: lubrication, things "sticking" etc.

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.

No one cares. I'd quick format it and call it a day. There's no chain of custody so it's never proof of anything in any sense that matters.

Not 3.5", but I had a 5.25 FULL height micropolis 140MB SCSI drive (yes MB).

Thing was a boat anchor, but more relevant to the discussion here, when powered on, it would sound like a scene from topgun while it spun up. Crazy loud.

It sadly died when I accidentally proved that you can indeed plug in a molex connector upside down, as long as your push hard enough (it just momentarily made contact, but that was enough to let the magic smoke out).

raid but just for one file

Google "quickpar", it's exactly this.

So what happens if the suspect just goes "uhm I forgot". There's not really a way to prove if he forgot, or is refusing to tell.

It 100% depends on vendor, and honestly, you have no way of checking. It may mean as little as "well, we pulled it from a working system.. so it's a fair bet it's working!"

Also keep in mind "5 year warranty" doesn't mean a damn thing if the company is gone next year.

dd

Checksum your files, as you say. Just md5sum or sfv tools will do this and are quick and easy to check at any time.

If you want a way to recover as well, create a certain % of parity files with a tool like par2. If you're just worried about the occasional flipped bit, a very small % of parity will go a really long way. Creating par2 is NOT super fast but you only have to do it once.

This is basically file-level RAID.