[CentOS] help fdisk and dd

Thu Mar 4 19:06:56 UTC 2010
m.roth at 5-cent.us <m.roth at 5-cent.us>

> 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).

That may be the case, but the laws and regulations still want that level
of security, due to the regular "one of our people lost a laptop/it was
stolen, and 7 zillion PII* got stolen!!!"

        mark "yes, I am working for the gov't"

* PII - personal identity information