[CentOS] help fdisk and dd

Thu Mar 4 18:43:17 UTC 2010
John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com>

Sorin Srbu wrote:
> I second that. Dban is the niftiest thing since sliced bread. Very handy
> tool, if a bit slow. But I guess that comes with the territory. 8-)
>   

DBAN runs at wire speed.  Its just that disks with 100s or 1000s of 
gigabytes take a long long time to fully write.

DBAN's default erase sequence is excessive for modern disks.  the old 
DOD erase sequences were devised for media that used simple NRZ type 
encodings, with RLL encoding methods used by modern disks, they don't 
make any sense at all.   all you really need is to write the disk with 
all 1s, then all 0s, and its about as good as it will get, not even 
CSI:Miami will find any actual data on it (of course, if the script 
writers need to, they'll invent data out of thin air).