Question on shredding a terebyte drive

[Fernando Cassia]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 5:32 PM, Dean S. Messing <deanm at 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?
>
> Thanks
> Dean
>

Since when is formatting a CPU-intensive task?.

Think about this... the heads ALL move in parallel on the same platter.
There aren´t 4 individual head actuator arms moving heads independently. If
the ´arm´ goes to track 255, all heads go to track 255...

Here, news for you:
http://www.dansdata.com/images/io012/heads1280.jpg

FC

PS:  this is also interesting reading....

Dual actuator HDs....
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-hdd-harddrive,8279.html
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