speeding up hard drive wipe

[Paul Smith]

On Sat, 2020-09-26 at 20:58 +0100, Grizzly via ubuntu-users wrote:
> > > > If after wiping there was anything recognisable as text then
> > > > this is some strange use of the term wipe that I have not come
> > > > across before.

This seems to be getting a little off-topic but:

If you really care about durable data privacy, the best (only?)
solution IMO is to enable full partition encryption in your partitions.
 That way anything written from the kernel across the control plane to
the partition will be already encrypted and regardless of what magical
storage locations may be hidden in your disk hardware to make secret
copies of your data, it will not be readable.

It's extremely simple to enable this (at least, it is when you install
Ubuntu--not sure about enabling after the fact, although you can enable
home directory encryption) and in my experience the performance hit is
not noticeable.  I did this on my Dell laptop from work, where I do all
my development (lots of C++ compilation, testing with massive disk IO,
etc.)

The passphrase is only needed when booting so it's not onerous.

Obviously this doesn't protect against many types of attack, but it is
very effective against people attempting to steal data directly from
your drive.  And you don't need to worry about wiping the drive when
you're done with it.