On 11/08/10 14:15, Tyler J. Wagner wrote: > On Wednesday 11 Aug 2010 11:01:16 Byte Soup wrote: >> One of my family wants to shred some HDDs before discarding them, or giving >> them away on freecycle. What application would you all recommend to do >> this? I have used "shred" to remove files, but I dont think it can do an >> entire disc (i.e. some previously deleted files) > > I use shred to dispose of drives every month. > > DBAN, as others have recommended, is handy. But you don't need it. You can > boot on the disk you want to shred, or an Ubuntu Live CD (which has shred), or > from a machine that has another boot disk and is cabled up to the target > drive. Then shred the drive: > > shred -v /dev/sdb > > Yes, it works on drive devices. Yes, you can do it to a live drive, even one > hosting the filesystem you booted from, and it will keep running. Very shortly > after, the running system won't be good for much besides watching the output. > -v will keep you informed of progress. It usually takes my server 48-72 hours > to make 3-4 passes shredding a 500 GB SATA drive connected via a USB drive > adaptor.
Interesting, I'll have to have a look at that. I can't comment on how long DBAN takes to wipe a 500GB drive as I haven't tried it (biggest drive I've used DBAN on is about 160GB which IIRC took about 3 or 4 hours). I guess Shred is handy if you want to just bung a drive on your server, set it going and forget about it. Generally when I use DBAN I chuck the drive in an old Dell P3, netboot and run DBAN from there. > I doubt anyone will have the resources or motivation to recover a drive after > even 1 pass of shred, much less the higher numbers recommended by security > researchers. Probably not :-) Rob -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
