incremental disk wipe?

[Rashkae]

On 15-03-07 01:09 AM, rikona wrote:
> I was checking the timing of securely wiping large disks - looks like
> it takes a looooong time. Is there a way to do this in smaller
> 'chunks', that might complete in an hour or so, eventually filling up
> the entire disk? I'm not hiding plots from NSA, so I don't need
> extreme security - just enough to discourage easy-tech snoops. :-))
>


dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=4M

This will be as fast as you can go, but it will still take a modern 
large hard drive several hours to finish.  But a drive that writes 
200MB/s still only writes 200MB/s... the drive can't multiple chunks 
simultaneously.