[Cialug] Good uses for smaller disks?

[Nicolai]

On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 07:39:22PM -0600, Matthew Nuzum wrote:

> Yes, recycling them by donating/selling/etc would be nice but I don't
> have high confidence that I can securely wipe the data without
> significant effort.

Have a look at:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html#Epilogue

That's the guy a lot of people think of when they think of secure
deletion, and he says a few random passes is as good as it gets.  He
himself uses dban (suggested in this thread).  Alternatively, OpenBSD
would be faster, IIRC, comparing it to the last time I tried dban.

$ dd if=/dev/random bs=512k count=1000 of=/dev/null 
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
524288000 bytes transferred in 3.610 secs (145194447 bytes/sec)

That's an old Pentium 4 surplus machine.  Not sure how that compares to
dban on the same hardware.

So, you would just pop in an OpenBSD install CD (iso images are free to
download) and select "shell" or hit control-c anytime after doing so.
Then run dd on the disk anyway you like, e.g.

$ dd if=/dev/zero bs=256k of=/dev/rwd0c; dd if=/dev/random bs=256k
of=/dev/rwd0c

to approximate dban's overwrite schedule.

Can you do a single random pass in dban?

Nicolai