On Fri, 2019-01-25 at 21:58 -0800, Samuel Sieb wrote:
On 1/25/19 6:45 PM, Jonathan Ryshpan wrote:
> I'm using shred on some 2Tb USB disk drive that I plan to give away. So
> far it has taken 8 hours to shred 50% of the drive, which implies that
> it will take about 16 hours to shred the whole drive. I have another 2
> drives to go.
>
> Is there a quicker way to protect my data when I give the drives away,
> other than smashing the drives to bits?
If you don't have state secrets on your hard drive and you don't expect
that the NSA will be using million dollar equipment to scan your drive,
a single pass with "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdx bs=1M" should be
sufficieshred -v -n1 /dev/sdcnt and will write at the max speed of
the hard drive.
I'll give dd a try; but I don't see offhand why
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdc bs=1M
should be quicker than what I'm using now, namely
shred -v -n1 /dev/sdc
Thanks to all for your help - jon