Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Volker Armin Hemmann <volkerarmin@××××××××××.com>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Securely deletion of an HDD
Date: Sun, 12 Jul 2015 16:32:56
Message-Id: 55A296A7.5070301@googlemail.com
In Reply to: [gentoo-user] Securely deletion of an HDD by Marc Joliet
1 Am 12.07.2015 um 14:35 schrieb Marc Joliet:
2 > Hi,
3 >
4 > I have to failed drives that I want to give away for recycling purposes, but
5 > want to be sure to properly clear them first. They used be part of a btrfs
6 > RAID10 array, but needed to be replaced (with "btrfs replace"). (In the
7 > meantime I converted the array to RAID1 with only two drives.)
8 >
9 > My question is how precisely the disks should be cleared. From various sources
10 > I know that overwriting them with random data a few times is enough to render
11 > old versions of data unreadable. I'm guessing 3 times ought to be enough, but
12 > maybe even that small amount is overly paranoid these days?
13 >
14 > As to the actual command, I would suspect something like "dd if=/dev/urandom
15 > of=/dev/sdx bs=4096" should suffice, and according to
16 > https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Random_number_generation#.2Fdev.2Furandom,
17 > /dev/urandom ought to be random enough for this task. Or are cat/cp that much
18 > faster?
19 >
20 > Any thoughts?
21 >
22 > Greetings
23
24 actually 1 time is enough. With zeros. Or ones. Does not matter at all.

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-user] Securely deletion of an HDD Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o>
Re: [gentoo-user] Securely deletion of an HDD Marc Joliet <marcec@×××.de>