Linux

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/(your drive)

You can do status=progress if you want like someone else posted and if you pick a block size go with either the physical block size reported by the disk in smartcontrol or some multiple of it that coincides with a big even division of your controllers memory. The drives physical block size will be “easy” for the drive, bigger blocks are faster.

People saying physical destruction are operating in a different world than you and people saying urandom or shred are operating off old (>30 years) information. The same technology that makes ssds unrecoverable black boxes was originally developed and deployed in spinning drives to eek out speed gains because the disk itself can be expected to know better than the operating system where to put shit and makes techniques (which were postulated but never actually implemented successfully in the wild) to recover overwritten data infeasible.

Alternately just reformat it and don’t worry. No one doing drive rmas cares about your data. They’re already on the razors edge with feedback and customer trust, you think they’re gonna burn their above board bread and butter to run a harvesting operation for a few bucks on the side? That’s usually the purview of your local pc repair shop…

Since dipshits are down voting me for being right, I'll just leave this here

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/13674/is-it-possible-to-recover-data-on-a-zeroed-hard-drive

sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/[sdx] bs=4096K status=progress

Or for multiple passes:

sudo shred -fzv /dev/[sdx]

Change [sdx] to the drive you want to wipe, make sure you double check it's the right one.

shred

Can also be used from KDE Partition Manager.

Use LUKS encryption in the future.

shred or alternatively you can zero out all the bytes in a drive with dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<DRIVE>

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk

I like badblocks in destructive mode. It can also do multiple rounds of overwriting. It is also a good tool to burn in a new hdd or test a used one. just check smartctl bad sector count, run it, check again if it increased.

no help to you, but a heads-up to anybody yet to deploy disks in such a scenario: always use encryption by way of LUKS2. you can set it up easily to unlock it on boot by a key file on the boot drive, thumb drive, TPM and such. so when a drive gets sold, RMA'd, etc., you got none of these issues.

source: sold my old drives recently and the shred procedure took ages. the new ones are encrypted so none of that shit no more.

https://linux.die.net/man/1/wipe

https://dban.org/

Assuming the drive writes normally a simple command like

dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sdX

Where sdX is the location of the drive should do the trick. Depending on drive time this may take a bit.

If the drive has bad sectors that it can't read right now, it likely had other sectors that were marginal and got copied (remapped) to new spare sectors before they became unreadable. So there is still potentially recoverable data in the remapped sectors, and not much you can do about it.

Basically, writing zeros to the disk is about as good as you can hope for. If your data is s00per seekrit to the point where you can't stand the possibility of any bits at all being recovered, you basically have to melt the drive. Otherwise, zero it and send it in.

Next time, set up encryption ahead of time, so your new drives never see plaintext. Some drives have a "secure erase" feature that is basically a crappy version of this built into the drive.

When I sold my drives, I used veracrypt with a 128 character password and PIM of 800+.

Isn't that the same thing as shredding?

The day job is Private Possum territory, so our agreement is

• we won't send in drives
• we will send proof of destruction

and I'm sure it costs more, but we don't have to worry about recovered user data.

Our stuff is also in those crazy-secure datacenters, too, so we don't need to mess with crypto-at-rest.

DNAM. Is or used to be on the UBCD.

For the future remember, encryption helps when the disk is no longer operational.