quick and good way to wipe a hard drive clean? (to sell)
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quick and good way to wipe a hard drive clean? (to sell)
Hi all,
I've been digging through guides online, and most point me to the use of 'shred' to clean my hard disk before selling it. My disk is 500GB, and after 8 hours it is only 13% through the first pass. This could take quite a while. Is there any other good but faster way?
We use to use DBAN at my college to wipe all the disks that came in. I don't think we ever did a 500GB drive, but it will certainly do it faster than your current program. I'm not sure how it scales, but 80GB drives were done in about 30-45mins normally.
I've been digging through guides online, and most point me to the use of 'shred' to clean my hard disk before selling it. My disk is 500GB, and after 8 hours it is only 13% through the first pass. This could take quite a while. Is there any other good but faster way?
Thanks!
George
I'm sure you've heard the old adage:
You can have it fast
You can have it right
You can have it cheap
I use DBAN as well, It's quick and easy.
Although your Drive is rather large it will take a considerable amount of time to thoroughly wipe the drive.
I can't say I' ever wiped a drive that large for disposal, so i can't provide a time estimate.. Personally I would KEEP a drive that large for repairs, etc.. : )
thanks for the responses. I think that my CPU is my bottleneck, shred uses up 100% CPU... probably generting pseudo-random data for writing over the disk. Will try out some of these others too, thanks!
There's one device (speed) and one procedural aspect (assurance) I'd like to mention in addition to what's been said already. FWIW: frandom and post-ops verification. Especially those who have actual forensics experience will appreciate the latter since it often isn't mentioned.
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