my goto utility for disk wiping is usually DBAN, but at least in the past i’ve always encountered some problems with getting DBAN to detect external disks i.e. connected via USB. this may no longer be an issue with the latest versions but i didn’t feel like repeating old mistakes. so i started looking at utilities that could be ran directly from the host OS.

at first i tried the eraser utility in windows but it kept crashing during the wipe process. i believe i’ve always had some stability issues with this application.

next, i decided to research the available options in linux. like everything in linux it appeared that were a million ways to skin this cat. from some very basic research these methods seem to be the easiest and relatively secure:
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdb bs=1M
scrub /dev/sdb
scrub -p dod /dev/sdb
shred -v /dev/sdb

the “scrub -p dod” option seems to be the most secure. note: in ubuntu i had to install the package for scrub.

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