[TriLUG] disk-wiping tool?

[Neil Roeth]

On Nov 13, Tanner Lovelace (lovelace at wayfarer.org) wrote:
 > Andrew Perrin wrote:
 > > Try booting to anything, then doing:
 > > 
 > > dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/hd{x}
 > > 
 > > where {x} is the drive you want to wipe.
 > > 
 > > ap
 > > 
 > 
 > One small correction.  For this you should probably use /dev/urandom
 > instead because /dev/random will block if there isn't enough randomness
 > in the random pool.  /dev/urandom will use the randomness in the pool
 > to generate a pseudo-random sequence and will therefore never block.
 > So, if you want to get done in a timely fashion, use /dev/urandom
 > instead of /dev/random when overwriting your harddrive.

Is /dev/urandom preferable to /dev/zero?  If so, why?

-- 
Neil Roeth