Benchmarking disk wipes

Benchmark different methods of disk wiping.

Frequently asked Questions

How do I wipe a disk?

See Securely wipe disk.

Are there other ways to benchmark a disk?

Of course. Take a look at Hdparm.

How do I get the HDD model with hdparm?

# hdparm -i /dev/sdX | grep Model

How do I check progress of dd while running?

See Core utilities#Checking progress of dd while running.

Benchmarking with dcfldd

Dcfldd doesn't print the average speed in MB/s like good old dd does but with time you can work around that.

Time the run clearing the disk:

# time dcfldd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=4M
18944 blocks (75776Mb) written.dcfldd:: No space left of device
real     16m17.033s
user     0m0.377s
sys      0m51.160s

Calculate MB/s by dividing the output of the dcfldd command by the time in seconds. For this example: 75776Mb / (16.4 min * 60) = 77.0 MB/s.

Data

Note: The community is encouraged to populate the tables in this section.

/dev/frandom

Tango-two-arrows.png

Tango-two-arrows.png

This article or section is a candidate for merging with Frandom.

Notes: The "Benchmarks" on the frandom page should get incorporated here. The frandom page should stay intact of course. (Discuss in Talk:Benchmarking disk wipes#)

/dev/zero

Note: As there has been no evident clarification in the article this table was moved from it can only be assumed all wipes were done with /dev/zero.
Manufacture Model HDD Speed (RPM) Interface Capacity (GB) Time (Hrs) Throughput (MB/s)
Hitachi HTS725016A9A364 7200 SATA2 160 0.72 63
Intel SSDSA2M080G2GC SSD SATA2 80 0.27 77
Samsung HD322HJ 7200 SATA2 320 1.15 74
Seagate ST31000333AS 7200 SATA2 1000 2.92 90
Seagate ST31500341AS 7200 SATA2 1500 4.13 96
Western Digital WD20EARS 5900 SATA2 2000 5.91 94