I have a terebyte sata drive that I need to securely wipe clean. It
originally had 2 partitions. I deleted them using `fdisk', rebooted,
and then as root ran
shred -vz /dev/sdd
The drive is capable of about 60MB/sec, but shred is only "shredding"
about 25MB every 5 seconds according to its output. Since the default
number of passes is 25, this works out to about 5 days.
The `shred' process is running at 100% CPU, presumably computing
the special random patterns for erasure. Since I have 4 CPUs
would creating 4 unformatted partions on the drive and then running
something like:
shred -vz /dev/sdd1
shred -vz /dev/sdd2
shred -vz /dev/sdd3
shred -vz /dev/sdd4
in parallel cut my time? Would be just as secure?
Thanks
Dean