Fastest, surest way to erase a hard drive?

Solution 1:

DBAN:
dban, Darik's "boot and nuke" bootable cd will do this. It takes a while, but that is because it really makes sure everything get erased when you use the longer format options.

Keep in mind 'sure' and 'fast' are opposing forces with something like DBAN. The faster the wipe, the easier it will be to recover the data.

Other Options:
If you have a lot of drives, you might consider looking at 3rd party vendors that provide this service, lots of companies that shred paper will do this service as well (for tapes and hard drives). If this is something you are going to be doing a lot in the future, you might want to buy a degausser. Both the 3rd party vendor and the degausser options will destroy the drives for future use, but you could still donate the rest of the hardware.

Solution 2:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

Seriously, I don't know any way of getting rid of data faster or easier. There's even a challenge for data recovery companies to restore anything that has been erased with dd. Nobody has been able to do it.

Best part: the drive is usable afterwords. I've used DoD spec'd erasing programs that actually didnt work(the system was bootable afterwords). dd, and no boot. plus dd is faster.

It take a bit to learn how to use dd. but I've used it for data recovery on failing hard drives(think if=/dev/hda of=/dev/sda) and it has worked wonders. Don't know how it works, and don't care, it's awesome.

Solution 3:

If you are decommissioning the drives physically, Bustadrive is good choice.

_{(source: pcpro.co.uk)}