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I'm trying to shred a 1TB hard disk drive with this command:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count="total sector number "

But unfortunately, I'm interrupted twice because of power failure. So before I start again, I wanna know if doing so would decrease the lifetime and/or performance of my drive.

Also, does dd have any advantages over shred or vice vera?

TerminalOfLove
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  • Oh yes, the drive is a 1TB WD Blue drive that's 6 months old. – TerminalOfLove Oct 02 '16 at 07:51
  • [If I use CCleaner regularly, will it damage or reduce the life time of hard disk?](http://superuser.com/questions/373010/if-i-use-ccleaner-regularly-will-it-damage-or-reduce-the-life-time-of-hard-disk) – nik Oct 02 '16 at 07:59
  • Have a look at this : http://superuser.com/questions/831486/complete-wiping-of-hard-drive-shred-wipe-or-dd – Carrein Oct 02 '16 at 08:09
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    The title is somewhat misleading :-). Shredding a hard-disk lets me think of a physical process, and this of course decreases its lifetime (to zero, actually, and immediately!). // back on-topic: in general, every operation decreases the lifetime. So, the more reads and especially writes you perform on the disc, the earlier it will fail. Only during power-off it does not age. – Tobias Knauss Oct 02 '16 at 09:01
  • If you consider the answer below to be suitable, then please click the gray tick beside it. – Hannu Dec 23 '16 at 16:00

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Writing data to the portion of the hard disk that contains the partition table is not very different from any other write. Only a very high number of repeated writes will make it wear out - as is normal for drives getting used for an elongated time.

But unfortunately, I'm interrupted twice because of power failure.

... that on the other hand might indicate a problem with the drive hardware.

Say that the 12 volt feed to a standard drive is used for driving the spindle and/or something that is important when writing to the disk (assuming this happens with ONE drive and none other).

Then if that voltage volt feed (or use of it) has some kind of problem, it might be attempting to pull more power from the PSU than it is capable of - and in that attempt it might "pull down" (one of) the voltage(s) to a level where the computer simply shuts off.

Hannu
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