[Cialug] Wiping server hard drives

[Nicolai]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 04:44:32PM -0500, Nathan C. Smith wrote:

> Bart's Boot'n'nuke is what I use when the server RAID card will support
> it.  I switch to dd if=/dev/random when It Bart doesn't work.  I'm
> looking for better options too.
> 
> I find dd to be really slow.

How are you calling dd?  Specifying a block size helps a lot:

  dd if=/dev/arandom bs=32k of=/dev/rwd0d # this is /tmp

is more than an order of magnitude faster.

Nicolai