[CentOS] Wiping USB drives

[Barry Brimer]

On Sat, 14 Apr 2007 centos at 911networks.com wrote:

> On Sat, 14 Apr 2007 11:20:16 -0500 (CDT)
> Barry Brimer <lists at brimer.org> wrote:
>
>>> I have a dozen of drives, ranging from 10Gb to 200Gb. I want to
>>> wipe them clean before donating them. I have a IDE/SATA to USB
>>> converter that works. I can see the drives properly.
>>
>> Depending on the filesystem on the drives, shred may be fine
>> "man shred" can tell you more.  You can also use
>> "cat /dev/random > /dev/devicename" as well.
>
> I have looked at shred before asking, and it said:
>
> The following are examples of file systems on which shred
> is not effective, or is not guaranteed to be effective in
> all file system modes:
>
> * log-structured or journaled file systems, such as those supplied
> with AIX and Solaris (and JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, Ext3, etc.)

As you did not mention the filesystem on your USB drives, I did not know 
whether or not shred would be effective for you.

It may or may not be reasonable to format the drives with vfat or ext2 and 
then run shred, which would add an additional layer of masking.

> How secure is cat /dev/random > /dev/devicename ?

How secure?  I can't really answer that.  I have used at before for the 
same purpose (I usually run it 3 times) and then tried to recover files 
with no successful recoveries.

I am by no means an expert in this area, I am simply offering a few ideas.

Barry