Question on shredding a terebyte drive

[Robert L Cochran]

After reading the entire thread, and watching the video, here is what 
I'd do.

Put the drive in a safe.

Go buy a new drive, and make use of it.

Drop the warranty claim even though it is valid. The company will save 
money in the end.

In about 10 years, or whenever the corporate data on the drive is deemed 
obsolete and nonsensitive, hold a Corporate Smash Day in which this 
drive and others are given to budding young technologists supplied with 
sledgehammers and other tools. Offer an all-expenses paid dinner to 
whoever reduces the drives to the smallest pieces.

Bob




On 09/02/2009 04:32 PM, Dean S. Messing 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
>
>