Fastest Disk Erasing Utility

[Techie]

Hello All,

I have quite a few disks to wipe out, short of using a ball peen hammer., does anyone know of a disk wiping utility that is fast?

I would be happy with basic one pass zeros (1 pass) performance, as an example, using this lowest level of disk wiping, it will take ma 4 days with my current erasing utility.. way too long when I have about 20 disks to wipe. I don't need Gutmann or even DoD levels, just basic or perhaps a 3 pass wipe would suffice, as long as the speed is there to go along with it.

- Techie

 

[MobileTechie]

Hello All,

I have quite a few disks to wipe out, short of using a ball peen hammer., does anyone know of a disk wiping utility that is fast?

I would be happy with basic one pass zeros (1 pass) performance, as an example, using this lowest level of disk wiping, it will take ma 4 days with my current erasing utility.. way too long when I have about 20 disks to wipe. I don't need Gutmann or even DoD levels, just basic or perhaps a 3 pass wipe would suffice, as long as the speed is there to go along with it.

- Techie

You're right not to worry about rmultiple-passes. Guttman etc is mostly a waste of time. AFAIK nobody has demonstrated the capability of retrieving meaningful amounts of data from modern drives overwritten with plain zeros.

Arguably more important is to use an app that uses the drive's ATA delete commands to do the job which will then include reallocated blocks. HDD Erase is one such app and it is free. It won't work via USB though. It's very fast too.

 

[PatrickB]

See post #6 in this recent thread:

http://www.technibble.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11631

-- Patrick B.

 

[NickCat11]

See post #6 in this recent thread:

http://www.technibble.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11631

-- Patrick B.

+1 for this software. I tried it out after his initial post about it and it works great.

 

[MobileTechie]

http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=129 - it appears Secure Erase and HDD Erase are the same thing.