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

[Brian Lavender]

On Wed, Sep 09, 2009 at 10:26:52AM -0700, Tim Riley wrote:
> 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

I have never used wipe, but it might do the trick. I am having a bit of
a problem finding the sources and the details for it.

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

I would not be absolutely certain on this one. The drive itsself might
do something to signal that the blocks are zero without fully writing
the zeros. Or, the data might still be available due to hysteresis
effects. 

> 
> > 
> > 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.

Good way to clean a disk.

/dev/urandom -> AES -> several passes.

It's all done for you here. 

I would say that your best bet is Darik's Boot And Nuke.
http://www.dban.org/

It performs several passes and writes random data to the drive. I will
have to take a look at wipe 

-- 
Brian Lavender
http://www.brie.com/brian/