shred vs writing zeros to wipe a drive

[Carruth, Rusty]

Don't' know if I need to see the code, but I'm certainly curious to know
how you made it slightly more efficient :-)

Did you do overlapped IO?  Or something else I'm not thinking of?

On the /dev/random vs /dev/urandom - I figure /dev/urandom is at least
one order of magnitude better than /dev/zero (in some base or other) :-)
But, yes, if you REALLY want good random numbers use /dev/random and be
prepared for a wait.  (but keep using the computer so it gets better
entropy info, IIRC)

RC

-----Original Message-----
From: plug-discuss-bounces at lists.phxlinux.org
[mailto:plug-discuss-bounces at lists.phxlinux.org] On Behalf Of Matt
Graham
Sent: Monday, August 19, 2013 10:36 AM
To: Main PLUG discussion list
Subject: RE: shred vs writing zeros to wipe a drive

On 2013-08-19 08:33, Carruth, Rusty wrote:
> One alternative to copying zeros to the drive is to copy from 
> /dev/urandom (I think it's urandom

Yes.  /dev/random gives you really high-quality randomness, which takes
a lot longer to generate.

I had to wipe an older 250G disk a while back since I was donating the
computer it was in.  I wrote a chunk of C that wiped block devices in a
slightly more efficient way than using dd from the shell.  I'll post
that code later if anyone's interested.

--
Crow202 Blog: http://crow202.org/wordpress There is no Darkness in
Eternity But only Light too dim for us to see.
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