Trying to format my HDDs...

[Lawrence MacIntyre]

It's not fast, but it's thorough.  As has been mentioned previously, if
you only want to zero the disk, and don't worry about the FBI or the KBG
(or whatever they're called now) decoding your disk, then dd
with /dev/zero or /dev/urandom is good enough and much faster.  You
don't want to try using /dev/random.  That would take FOREVER if used on
an entire disk.

On Thu, 2005-01-13 at 13:51 +0000, Ben Hodgson wrote:
> Well, I tried it last night and it took just over two hours to do a 16GB
> Maxtor HDD on a PIII 733MHz with 256MB RAM on the auto-nuke setting, if that
> helps.
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Markus Kolb" <ubuntu-ml at tower-net.de>
> To: <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com>
> Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2005 1:42 AM
> Subject: Re: Trying to format my HDDs...
> 
> 
> > Lawrence MacIntyre wrote on Wed, Jan 12, 2005 at 16:39:04 -0500:
> > > I'm assuming that you asked the wrong question, and that you don't
> > > actually want to format the disk, but you do want to remove all of the
> > > data on them.  If so, you want the following:
> > >
> > > Darik's Boot and Nuke <http://dban.sourceforge.net>
> >
> > Is it faster than 'dd'?
> >
> > Markus
> >
> > -- 
> > ubuntu-users mailing list
> > ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
> > http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users
> >
> >
> 
> 
-- 
Lawrence MacIntyre     865.574.8696     macintyrelp at ornl.gov
               Oak Ridge National Laboratory
High Performance Information Infrastructure Technology Group
               AKO: lawrence.macintyre at us.army.mil
           SIPRNet: macintyrelp at ornl.doe.sgov.gov