Is sudo dd taking too long to wipe hard drive?

Posted by Adam133718 on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by Adam133718
Published on 2013-11-10T15:30:06Z Indexed on 2013/11/10 16:11 UTC
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I have a 200gb HDD which I removed from a macbook due to several corrupt files in startup. One thing led to another and I decided that I needed to format the drive.

I used the command

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb

which is supposed to wipe everything off of the hard drive. It is my understanding that the command writes 0's over every bit on the drive, which I would imagine must take a while. The process has been going for about 18 hours now. I can use other functions of operating system like the web browser and I can even use another terminal window, so I know the system is not frozen.

Should I restart the process or let it continue on?

Any advice will help. Thanks.

By the way, I already noticed a post similar to this that was previously answered though the user was not using the same command as I was.

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