speeding up hard drive wipe

[Chris Green]

On Sat, Sep 26, 2020 at 07:24:59AM -0400, Ken D'Ambrosio wrote:
> On 2020-09-25 19:47, Noah wrote:
> > Hi there,
> > 
> > I am using the wipe binary to erase a drive.  My hard dive is a 6TB
> > SATA drive sitting in an USB drive box.
> > 
> > $ sudo wipe -q /dev/sdc
> > Okay to WIPE 1 special file ? (Yes/No) yes
> > 
> > The UI is telling me that it will take over 10 weeks to complete one
> > round of WIPE.
> > 
> > Any clues how to speed this up?
> > 
> > The following DD command took a few hours.
> > dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdc bs=4k
> > 
> > Cheers
> 
> I've never seen or heard of anyone *actually* recovering data from a drive
> wiped by a simple overwrite such as dd does.  I've heard anecdotes about how
> it's theoretically possible, and if you cared about, say, the NSA *really
> trying* to get your data, maybe I'd be worried.  But in the real world?  I'm
> just not.  If you really care, do another wipe with /dev/urandom, and call
> it good: most of your bits will have been randomly overwritten, twice.  I
> just don't see data coming back from that.
> 
I absolutely agree.  I think people have a rather inflated idea of how
valuable their 'information' is! :-)  Even a disk full of deleted (by
the OS) files will take a huge amount of time to extract anything useful
from.

As another protection I don't save anything like passwords on my
system, so someone who (for example) extracts the whole of my Firefox
cache won't find anything useful there anyway.

-- 
Chris Green