Hi, I have to failed drives that I want to give away for recycling purposes, but want to be sure to properly clear them first. They used be part of a btrfs RAID10 array, but needed to be replaced (with "btrfs replace"). (In the meantime I converted the array to RAID1 with only two drives.)
My question is how precisely the disks should be cleared. From various sources I know that overwriting them with random data a few times is enough to render old versions of data unreadable. I'm guessing 3 times ought to be enough, but maybe even that small amount is overly paranoid these days? As to the actual command, I would suspect something like "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdx bs=4096" should suffice, and according to https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Random_number_generation#.2Fdev.2Furandom, /dev/urandom ought to be random enough for this task. Or are cat/cp that much faster? Any thoughts? Greetings -- Marc Joliet -- "People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we don't" - Bjarne Stroustrup
pgpMn66H8rxrc.pgp
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