Contents

• Good steps to follow
  • Explaination for the big brains (190 < you_are_here < 200)
  • Few Notes

Hi again, today in this NOOB friendly Privacy series of my journal, I will be discussing a good, trusted way to wipe disks off. Including your precious SSD or that god awful HDD from your grandma's PC which you wanna sell on ebay for couple of bucks. This is must.

By this time we know how power hungry people really are and data is power so, people starve to get some data off of you that they will even try to recover your deleted files and stuff.

Whether you are an hacktivist or just some normal office guy following protocols of your glorious company or you wanna sell your computer/laptop/drive to anyone. You should wipe this off like you are washing your hands with the soap (OH NO!! Another Coronavirus reference LOL).

Before proceeding to it and regretting later, Read notes below

Good steps to follow

1. Install pipeview pv (thank me later). I dunno which distro you use so figure yourself out how to install for that.

2. Done that? Good coz its only the fun stuff now.

3. Fun part is...

4. sudo dd if=/dev/urandom | pv | sudo dd of=/dev/<disk_you_love>
   

5. Go grab your favorite drink! Or if you are still here, see the explanation below.

Explaination for the big brains (190 < you_are_here < 200)

This just overwrites every bit written on the disk with that of the random values generated by kernel. Some people might even say this:

/dev/urandom is cryptographically insecure. I will rather use /dev/random. Its the reason why I win that poker match last night.

Don't, Just Don't. Okay? You will regret that decision immediately. See notes below

One more thing, for SSDs there will be few writes i.e. the max capacity of it but that doesn't limit your TBWs necessarily. It's one time thing before you either buy or sell your old drive on craigslist.

Few Notes

• Just remember one itsy bitsy thing, do try this first on any spare drive rather on your system disk, just to experiment before if you are complete NOOB monkey. I ain't responsible for any destruction you cause either on your system or anything to this world.

• Also before initiating, do not do this on already formatted partitions otherwise everything, including your formatting of drive will be overwritten.

• A common misconception lies where people start to believe on the hearsay of /dev/urandom vs /dev/random. It's true that /dev/urandom is faster than /dev/random but that doesn't mean it is somehow inferior to that.

• TL;DR /dev/random is good for generation of one time keys due to necessary entropy required for that, whereas /dev/urandom is better when you require fast generation of numbers, so as not to make kernel wait in collection of required entropy for insignificant things. Waiting for kernel to generate proper entropy could cause potential deadlocks.

That's all for now! For any suggestions or any good piece of info, just email me.