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Currently when I want to wipe a USB disk with pseudorandom data in Linux I do the following:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdb conv=notrunc

urandom is very, very slow, it gets to the point where the bottleneck is not the device.

I know of another method -- the Mersenne twister. This is used in one instance by DBAN as a PRNG to securely erase data with, and it is easily 'random' enough for wiping drives -- and it is very fast. However, I'm not sure how I would use it in Linux. Is there a Mersenne twister program which I can then pipe into dd to wipe drives with?

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Just a comment. There is no documented case of data being recovered from a device after cleaning with it zeroes. – user39559 Jan 28 '11 at 14:37
I'm aware of that, but the point to be made is that technology is always advancing, so it may be possible to do so in the future. – Matthieu Cartier Jan 28 '11 at 17:41
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The wipe utility uses a Mersenne Twister PRNG for the random passes.

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Thanks, that's great! :) – Matthieu Cartier Jan 28 '11 at 17:42
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Why are you using DD to wipe drives? shred is designed specifically to do that and is common to all modern distros.

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