shred vs writing zeros to wipe a drive

[keith smith]

Hi All,

I have an old computer that I am giving to a friend so I wanted to wipe the drives in preparation for that.

The master is 250GB
The slave is 1TB.

I read a couple articles that suggested using a rescue disk and the shred utility to take care of this.  I also read that shred is not necessary to just write all zero's to the drive.

The rescue disk I am using is DVD disk one of CentOS 6.3.


I ran shred on the fist drive.  It took 4.5 hours to run 3 shred passes plus 1 that writes zeros to the entire drive.

Command : shred -zv /dev/sda  (this was on the master disk)

Then I ran : dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=16M

In one of the articles it showed the above command with bs=1M

Does the size of "bs" matter?

Also what about the argument that shred is overkill?

Thanks!!

Keith


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Keith Smith
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