oktokie wrote:

> DoD Harddrive Secure Erase Wipe
>
> I have a project which I need to DoD harddrives for the company. I
> have large raid-scsi enclosure which I can use.
>
> I have access Quad/Octa Xeon P4 servers with 3 dual channel LVE/SE
> ultra scsi 160 cards. With these, I would be able to drive 4 x 14 scsi
> drive (IBM EXP300 / 3531-1RU) units.
>
> What are my options?
>
> I was thinking about doing following.
>
> 1. for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7; do time dd /dev/random of=/dev/sda
> bs=1048576; done


Wow, just four obvious problems...

1. the syntax if "if=$inputdevice".

2. This will take forever, since /dev/random blocks if not sufficient
entropy is available, and only fill up at a rate of about 1 KB/s.

3. Without a 'sync' at the end, the last block might not be written in case
of a hard crash.

4. Why a blocksize of only 1 MB, and why not write it as "1m"?

> I think with 14 x 36GB scsi in raid5 setup would take approximately
> 18 x 7pass = 5 days.
> This is pretty bad.


As standing above, it would rather take 117.3 years. :-)

However, I can't follow your calculation either. If you write to all disks
simultanously (damn, add a '&'!), at a rate of 40 MB/s, it would take
roughly 2 hours.

> I've got a question, does anyone have working knowledge of DoD5200.28-
> STD & DoD5200.22-M? I need to know how it's supposed to work,


Simply said, it's an out-dated idea with concepts that don't apply any more.
Unless you're required to do it, don't do it.