[vox-tech] Most efficient way to wipe hard drives

[Tim Riley]

On Wed, 2009-09-09 at 10:07 -0700, Darth Borehd wrote:
> This is what I've been doing lately. I boot with a Fedora 10 live CD.
> Then I mount the hard drive and run
> 
> wipe -cifkr /dev/sda1

Try something like "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 bs=10000"

> 
> Then just for good measure, I repartition and reformat over it.

With dd, you have confidence the drive will be all zeros.

> 
> It seems to pretty much shred the files but it takes hours.  Anybody
> have a faster and more efficient method?

I have no idea the speed. But the process is just writing
zeros and doing nothing else.

> 
> The requirements:
> * No cost and is usable in a business
> * Securely erase so well that no proprietary information can be
> recovered, by say an experienced attacker with thousands of dollars to
> spend on equipment
> * Require a minimum of interaction (to free technicians to work on other tasks)
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