On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 4:32 PM, Dean S. Messing <deanm(a)sharplabs.com> wrote:
I have a terebyte sata drive that I need to securely wipe clean. It
originally had 2 partitions. I deleted them using `fdisk', rebooted,
and then as root ran
shred -vz /dev/sdd
The drive is capable of about 60MB/sec, but shred is only "shredding"
about 25MB every 5 seconds according to its output. Since the default
number of passes is 25, this works out to about 5 days.
The `shred' process is running at 100% CPU, presumably computing
the special random patterns for erasure. Since I have 4 CPUs
would creating 4 unformatted partions on the drive and then running
something like:
shred -vz /dev/sdd1
shred -vz /dev/sdd2
shred -vz /dev/sdd3
shred -vz /dev/sdd4
in parallel cut my time? Would be just as secure?
<
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines>
The question is where the bottleneck lies.
If you think it's CPU bound because of rand bit patterns, shred it with just
the non-random patterns (IIRC I think you set this by limiting iterations,
the first few iterations are standard patterns: all zeros, all ones, 1010)
My other suggestion would be to use an old junker PC, plug in your drive and
boot DBAN and let it churn away for a while. DBAN may be optimized and may
run faster (and probably does a more secure job) than shred.
--
-jp
If I was being executed by injection, I'd clean up my cell real neat. Then,
when they came to get me, I'd say, "Injection? I thought you said
`inspection'." They'd probably feel real bad, and maybe I could get out of
it.
deepthoughtsbyjackhandey.com