what is the best disk wipeing utility?

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chronic9

Supreme [H]ardness
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Aug 18, 2004
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At work i use Gdisk from Norton to wipe drives and it takes about an hr to wipe a 80 gig PATA. at home i use autoclave - takes FOREVER. and now i read that DBAN is even used by the department of energy - supposdely takes an hr. to do a 20gb disk.

which one is the best one and will format the fastest?
 
Do you really require anything more destructive than wiping with 0´s a hard disk?

I highly recommend autoclave, but i wont go sata :(

DBAN works great too, but its way slower than autoclave.

If you have a linux bootdisk, or even UltimateBootCD, you can enter the command manually and wait until the disk gets wiped:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda


Good Luck

oldmx :D
 
last time i used autoclave it took forever. and it was on a floopy too *shrugs* i dont have a floopy drive anymore. but its not complicated to make it boot off a CD. and it doesnt do SATA either. i guess ill stick with GDISK for now. ill give DBAN a try soon.
 
I highly recommend BCWipe from Jetico. You even have 7 different wipe patterns to choose from. I do not know of a better and speedier program that you can use. They are also the makers of BestCrypt.

http://www.jetico.com/

Also remember that speed and a quality wipe do not go hand in hand. Using only 0’s and not varying the pattern is not good for the HD but using a random pattern is good for the HD and is a much more secure delete but it will take a much longer time to do it.
 
Another good file wipe program is in System Mechanic Pro. It also has a fast wipe that completely deletes the file names without having to take the time to delete the whole file. Needless to say that this is not as secure but keeps almost any forensic software from finding the file location.
 
I forgot about Kill Disk. The Pro version is a very good program for wiping complete disks.
 
I always use DBAN for this but I admit that it is pretty slow sometimes. However, I'm a home user without business-related time constraints, so I can afford to waste an hour or two.
 
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