Question on shredding a terebyte drive

[Jeff Voskamp]

On 09/02/2009 04:32 PM, Dean S. Messing wrote:
> 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
>    
I strongly suspect that would actually be a lot slower since the drive 
would be doing _a lot_ of seeking.

Jeff