[geeks] Wiping disks FAST?

[Sandwich Maker]

" From: Gary Goddard <gaz.god at gmail.com>
" 
" 
" I've got the job of wiping a lot of sca disks (about 4000!!!!).
" 
" What is the best way of doing a one pass wipe? No DOD wipe is required.
" 
" Available hardware is 2 Sun 711 12 disk cases and Sun or Intel servers.
" 
" Currently driving each 711 from an XP box and formating an NTFS
" partition on each disk through drive manager.
" 
" Speed is of the essence because I'm being paid by the disk.
" 
" Any help would be appreciated.



1. assuming you're doing it on a solaris machine:
	in /etc/system, set maxphys to some large number.  the limit
	was 1MB on 2.6; i still use 0x100000 on 8.  it might be worth
	experimenting to find how large a value you can set before
	getting boot errors...
2. dd bs=1024k if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/raw/disk 

and bob's yer uncle...

it would work best if you could dedicate a scsibus to this.
whether you'd want to do more than one disk in parallel would depend
on the bus/disk speed ratio, but you could load a 711 and do a for
loop to walk the dd through the stack.  while it's running, load the
other 711.  when it finishes, stop-a the machine, swap 711s, then
resume.  repeat until done...
________________________________________________________________________
Andrew Hay                                  the genius nature
internet rambler                            is to see what all have seen
adh at an.bradford.ma.us                       and think what none thought