$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mapper/to_be_wiped status=progress59001459200 bytes (59 GB, 55 GiB) copied, 904 s, 65.3 MB/s
65 MB/s, nice, nice. At this rate it’s only going to take…. 3 days to wipe this 16TB drive.
@acdha Hah, good call, I had just remembered that I usually do… something with block sizes when I saw this.
Speed is still trending down so maybe not a steady state yet, but looks like maybe a 4-5x speedup, so this might be done in only 16 or so hours!
@acdha Just in time for the second drive to arrive so I can start on that one. 😅
@pganssle this is the kind of thing which got me to love encrypted storage so all I had to do was wipe the key.
@acdha Yeah, this is an empty drive that I’m about to encrypt. Filling it with random data is the first step, which I may be cargo culting, but IIRC the idea is that it prevents leaking the amount of data on the drive or something.
@cnx @acdha Yes, but the way it works is that you create a dm-crypt partition seeded from /dev/urandom, then you mount it and fill it with 0s. The encryption translates the 0s into random bytes.
Here are the instructions I usually use: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt/Drive_preparation
@pganssle setting a larger block size (bs=1M for example) might help.
@pganssle set the block size higher? I typically use bs=1048576.