A quick and simple way to wipe a hard drive

For various reasons, it is necessary to wipe hard drives before disposing them. Writing disk with all zeros should suffice most occasions. This can be done as:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdXY

where /dev/sdXY is the device name of the hard drive to work on. To get a better performance, we may need to set bs option, e.g.,

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb1 bs=10M

to make dd read and write in 10M bytes at a time.