[CentOS] slightly OT: dban

[John R Pierce]

  On 08/27/10 7:33 AM, Kevin Thorpe wrote:
>
> Assuming the drive to kill is /dev/sda:
> dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda
>

/dev/random is WAY to slow for this.   byte at a time, gads, that would 
take *days* (hint, use bs=65536 next time you use dd to bulk wipe something)

with modern drives, just writing one pass of zeros is plenty good 
enough.  the old much-touted DoD erase pattern dates back from the days 
of MFM drives where bits were the size of boulders.

> Do it a few times for good measure. At work we have a policy of
> physically destroying
> drives which grates a little at times.

ditto here.   but the reality is, wiping a single 500GB drive can take 
HOURS, and if you have a whole palette of dead systems, many hours of 
time digging the drives out, hooking them up to erase fixtures, etc etc, 
the labor costs would be ridiculous.   then you get server racks with 
SCSI, FC, etc drives, all requiring different sorts of fixtures and 
having MANY drives in them.

all the drives get yanked, and stored in a bin until the chipper truck 
arrives, tossed in the chipper and recycled as scrap metal.