Kirk Bubul wrote:
I have recently acquired 2 new WD My Passport 4 TB external hard
drives. I really like their small size, different colors, and
the fact that they get their power from the USB 3.0 cable plugged
into the USB port on my desktop - no separate power cord and
little brick to crawl around plugging into an electrical outlet.

Hopefully it's not as picky about cable make/length as the USB 2.0
USB-powered drive that I use. That's an old WD 320GB one though. I
back up all my computers onto it in duplicate and still have plenty
of room, no idea what most individuals need TB drives for.

I have three old external hard drives that I would like to
retire. The largest is 3 TB and the smallest is 1 TB. One is an
old and slow USB 2.0. I've tried using several different free
wipe programs, but all seem to require over 15 hours to do a
one-cycle wipe on the smallest drive. I'd like quicker.

Question: Is here a good free wipe program that would wipe these
external drives in less than a workday? Once wiped, I will throw
these old drives away unless someone speaks up and will pay for
the shipping charges to get them from me to them.

If you're tossing them, you could just go for the old "drill a hole
through it" method. If your data was important enough for someone
to analyse the remains of the platters in a lab, you wouldn't be
worried about waiting a few hours.

Sticking with electronic methods, you basically wait as long as
you want depending on how secure you want the erasure to be. If you
have a complicated partition layout on there, simply writing random
data to the partition table before reformatting would be enough to
make it darn annoying for anyone trying to recover the data easily.
In Linux this could be done easily with "dd".

To write over everything you're just going to be limited to the
speed of the drives. If you're adventurous you could pull apart
the enclosures to see if the drives themselves are actually SATA
and plugged into a SATA-USB adapter. In that case using the
direct SATA connection may make things go faster.

With "dd" there'd also be nothing to stop you picking random bits
of the drive to write over and leaving the rest alone, if you so
desired. It would be a funny approach, but it's the only way to
improve speed if data throughput is the bottleneck.

Oh, except some drives do come with built-in erasure routines
in their own firmware that can be triggered by software released
by the drive manufacturer. That would sure be quicker because the
random data to write is generated by the drive itself, it doesn't
need to come from the computer. It's only some drives though, I've
never had a chance to try it myself.

--
__ __
#_ |\| | _#