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Given 

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

provides sufficient wiping for our purposes, what is the fastest way to "zero" the drive? I have heard of this "Secure Erase" feature that is built in to hard drives but disabled by the bios. Will it be the fastest way or is there another?

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one pass wipe like zero fill is the fastest, secure wipe just means more passes which is much longer process. No one has ever recovered data after a one pass overwrite, so in a sense this is as secure as it gets, more passes is just paranoia....nber.org/sys-admin/overwritten-data-guttman.html – Moab Nov 21 '11 at 16:37
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I assume, that hdparm's functionality does what you are referring to as "secure erase":

hdparm --security-erase NULL /dev/sdX

Never actually tried this (so no idea how it scales), tempted to do now though. Hopefully, someone more in the know will comment.

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