Re: Wiping a drive: /dev/zero or /dev/urandom better?

["Morgan Reed" <morgan.s.reed () gmail com>]

On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 9:47 AM, JW <jw () mailsw com> wrote:
> I've got a theoretical question: when wiping a drive (I'm talking about Linux
> here), which of the following is more: fill the drive with data
> from /dev/zero or /dev/urandom?

Either is adequate to bury data beyond simple recovery (i.e. recovery
not requiring disassembly of the disk and specialised equipment (and
even then it's theoretically still good enough for anybody other than
the military)).

If you go for random use urandom not random, random is a very small
pool which slowly regenerates, urandom provides a constant stream of
(pseudo)random data.