speeding up hard drive wipe

[R C]

On 9/26/20 5:24 AM, 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.
>
> $.02,
>
> -Ken
>

It is not only theoretically possible, it is definitely possible to do.  
Granted, trying to do that at home, or with "regular" computer 
equipment, it would not be really reliable, consistent, if even at all 
possible. However, in classified environments very drastic measures are 
taken, to great lengths, to destroy data, however the device will not 
survive it, it will be destroyed beyond recognition.


If you just want to "wipe" it for your own private use, just format it. 
If you want to wipe it because someone else is going to use it, category 
your mom, use a "software wipe"  ie  overwrite it a few times.


If you have something never to be seen by anyone anymore, and really 
need that data/device destroyed, there are companies doing just that, 
with different levels of security, with different levels of price tags. 
(think EMP, degaussing, shredding, both, and smelting, even combinations 
of that.  If you want to use a hammer, for example with a phone, yeah, 
that won't really work.


so yeah...  here's some food for conspiracies ...   :)