Yes.
Comment on What is the best way to safely and completely erase all data from old laptops?
Knusper@feddit.de 10 months agoHmm, what does that full format do? Write zeros over everything?
Personally, I would run shred on the root filesystem. It’s a tool specifically intended for properly deleting data (overwrites it with random data multiple times).
someguy3@lemmy.world 10 months ago
otp@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Even writing 0’s takes hours per TB sometimes. Guess it depends on how much time you have
Knusper@feddit.de 10 months ago
It took maybe 10 minutes or so for a 256 GB hard drive for me, if I remember correctly.
That was an SSD, though, so yeah, mileage would definitely vary on an HDD.