Opposite of DataRecovery - Trying to destroy quickly

[volunteercenter]

I have ~600 harddrives in front of me that all need to be filled with zeros and their data erased forever. Is there a fast way of doing this? Here are some solutions I've thought of:

* A lot of the hard drives are of similar model & size, so I'm thinking I can fill up one of the harddrives entirely with a dummy file. Go into ghost, and ghost the drive with the huge dummy file. Dump it onto all of the other drives and then do a format & partition. Will this effectively and reasonably remove all past data from being recovered?

* Insert some sort of crazy rogue virus that will really mess up all of the data from being ever recovered?

* ????? I've thought about filling the entire hard drive with zeros, but this takes a very long time (~2hrs a peice).

Another thought, is there any way to look at the raw contents of a harddrive so verify that all of the old contents have been removed?

Thanks everyone for your thoughts.

 

[SYAR2003]

I really dont think you will save any time doing this.
After all writing a image to a drive the sectors will
have to be filled with data sector by sector anyway.

I would use killdisk on one by one.

If some are to be reused , you have the option to
killdisk with zero filling one drive .Use a partition tool
to partition it as a primary taking all space and formatting it. Then copy this one with sector-sector
copying to other equal models.
(maybe the manufacturers have a drivecopy utility)

 

[volunteercenter]

Syar,

THanks much for your input. Your thought regarding using kill disk with zero filling the drive, partitioning it, then doing a sector-sector copying to equal models is an excellent idea.

Do you know if Norton's ghost works for this?

Where can I download the killdisk utility?

Thanks much in advance.

Any further thoughts?

 

[SYAR2003]

Ghost:
Sector copy copies each sector of the disk,
regardless of whether that sector contains data.
So alle the zero filled sectors will be copied.

A native copy copies the contents of the files and recreates the partition information as needed. A native copy is sometimes called a nonsector copy.
(This will not destroy the old sectors of the disks)

Ghost uses specific switches to create more exact duplicates of the original disk. To copy the entire disk, including the entire boot track, all sectors, and unpartitioned space, and to prevent Ghost from filtering extraneous or erroneous information from the boot track, run Ghost with the -IR switch.(RAW)

Source:

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/docid/2001111413481325?Open&src=&docid=19

Killdisk
it's easy to find
killdisk.com