[ale] A little math

Brian Pitts brian at polibyte.com
Wed Feb 10 12:54:09 EST 2010


On 02/10/2010 11:35 AM, Scott Castaline wrote:
> Okay I've got a dumb question for you math types. How long should it 
> take to fill a 1TB hdd with random data using
> "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sd"? I've done some more searching and found 
> some numbers and if I figured them right I'm looking at about 8 days. Is 
> this accurate?

That sounds in the ballpark for me.

We do a one pass wipe with random data on hard drives donated to Free IT
Athens. Even though most of our drives are 10 or 20 GB, on old computer
systems it takes hours. It doubles as a great stress test though.

-- 
All the best,
Brian Pitts


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