[CentOS] Wiping USB drives

Sat Apr 14 17:06:27 UTC 2007
Luciano Miguel Ferreira Rocha <strange at nsk.no-ip.org>

On Sat, Apr 14, 2007 at 09:28:51AM -0700, 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.)

That refers only to shreding files on those filesystems, not shreding
the block devices.

So shred /dev/device doesn't care about the filesystem in it.

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

Unless you're willing to keep moving your mouse and/or typeing for a
couple of days, I don't recomend that. :)

/dev/urandom is faster than random and doesn't block, but isn't that
much faster. Also, it's a single pass, so I doubt it will be as safe as
shred.


-- 
lfr
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