My current software wiping solution will fill a 500GB Seagate 7200.12 drive with 0x00 in less than 90 minutes. That's on the lastest generation of drives of course, so for a slower drive your mileage will vary.
Ok, what IS your current software wiping solution?
Since I have now had more than one email on this, I'll elaborate further.
As I have indicated in other posts here, I use a modified version of linux dd to write 0x00 to the entire addressable space of the hard drive. I have been keeping a mental note of the speeds over the years, and as the hard drives get faster, so do the wiping speeds. If you look at for example Tom's Hardware HDD speed charts, you'll get an idea of what kind of speeds you should be seeing during a wipe process. http//
The specific implementation is unfortunately in limited distribution as determined by the author (not me) which is why I didn't bother mentioning it, but if you're good with linux you should be able to make something yourself. I have tested and validated the methodology more times than I care to recall.
I am aware of the arguments about wiping solutions and HDD sectors that aren't available because they are in a GList or PList, but I'm using this specifically to prepare drives for lab or field usage so I don't have to counter some kind of anti-forensics data hiding technique or extreme hard drive failure issue because the drives are under my control the whole time.
Taking into consideration a "normal" user, that probably has more or less 500GB HDD SATA2, which would be the fastest way to wipe the HDD ?
The fastest orthodox way would probably be anything based on the ATA secure erase – you have no external bandwidth at all. Anything that involves sending zeroes over the ATA interface will have to cope with both the HDU-to-disk bottleneck, and the computer-to-HDU bottleneck.
(I count microwave ovens and degaussers as unorthodox.)
* Secure Erase Utility (not updated anymore I think)
It just sends a standard command block to the drive. What do you think needs updating?
I just wiped a 120GB 2.5" SATA drive (7200 RPM) last night using a USB port and killdisk in 128 minutes. Probably not the fastest way but this was my personal laptop that I'm getting ready to sell. A FireWire would probably be much faster but my device (don't remember what brand it is now) doesn't have a FW port. My write-blocker is a Wiebetech Ultradock and does not have an option to allow for writes to the HD.
For 3.5" SATA drives my new machine has removable external drive bays that should be much faster but I haven't tried it yet.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/xxx
Dariks' Boot and Nuke disk! easy and depending on your hardware quick!
http//
Ok, what IS your current software wiping solution?
You could try the SPADA CD (System Preview And Data Acquisition). But, this CD is available to the members of International Association of Computer Investigative Specialists (IACIS). So talk to some of your buddies that are IACIS members.
The CD contains a number of forensic programs and is based upon Knoppix. Using the CD, an examiner can perform many forensic tasks, including forensically wiping a hard drive.
Lately I've been using old Dell GX520 machine (Pentium D CPU, anywhere from 512-2GB RAM) and connect two SATA 3.5" HDDs (WD1001FALS 1TB, "Caviar Black") to the motherboard to wipe evidence storage hard drives prior to use.
I use Knoppix v.6.2.0 ("Adriane" through the simple shell, no GUI overhead, maybe?) and simple DD command (like ctendell stated). Using one terminal I wipe /dev/sda and then in another I wipe /dev/sdb. Running two instances at the same time, DD reported ~87.5MB/s (So just around 3 hours to complete). If I wipe only one drive at a time, DD reported around 91MB/s.
When I used DBAN 1.6/1.7/2.0, same machines and same model HDDs, the wiping would start in the 80MB/s range and then slow to around 67MB/s.
You could also use DD to ensure a HDD is wiped dd if=/dev/sda | hexdump -C | grep [^00]; however, the speeds that will read at (with two HDD's going at the same time) was around 13MB/s, so expect ~20 hours to complete! Probably would take less time to just wipe with 3 passes (~9 hours) overnight and consider it sufficient.
Hope that helps. I'd say short of spending money on external wiping hardware, a free linux bootable CD and an old machine running overnight will get things done! Only limitation to how many drives you can do in parallel is how many drives you can connect to one machine at once.
PS. don't forget to disconnect (power… and data cables just to be safe) storage devices you don't want to accidentally wipe. I treat the Linux live CD the same as DBAN's warning when I'm wiping hard drives.
Hello
If you want a secure wipe, use Blancco. If time is your concern just use the old wipedisk tool (don't know if still available on the net)