Fastest and effective way to make data unrecoverable on a 1TB external USB drive

Question

I have a 1TB USB external drive that I need to return for warranty and need a fast way to hide my data in case anyone tried to recover data from it! I know about dd, shred etc... but I'm afraid (I'm not totally sure about the amount of time needed actually) it will take too long to finish and I need something fast!

What's the fastest option I have to do it?

Thanks

how long do you have? Why is returning a drive under warranty such an emergency? — Esther, Apr 26 '22 at 18:02
You can reformat the drive, but that doesn't actually remove the data, just makes it look like there is nothing on the drive when you plug it in. Any other option would require writing over all the data on the disk, which should take a similar amount of time regardless of the method used. — Esther, Apr 26 '22 at 18:06
@Esther just dont have much time to work on it before returning! Warranty because the drive I brought is extremely slow and I cant use it that way. The problem is that I've already moved many files on it and I just re-formatted it so far (the normal way) — Frank, Apr 26 '22 at 18:25
If you have a couple of hours, any of the solutions you found should work. — Esther, Apr 26 '22 at 18:34
@Esther well, it's not actually a couple of hours: https://ibb.co/qWTjJX5 by using the Disks utility — Frank, Apr 26 '22 at 18:44
That utility is likely doing multiple passes, while one should be sufficient for your purposes. Try shred -n 1 -v <your disk here>, and see if it gives any indication how long that will take. -n 1 tells it to only overwrite once (since you don't have much time) and -v is for "verbose", so it will show progress. — Esther, Apr 26 '22 at 18:50
Of course, writing zeros instead of random is faster but less secure. Also, this answer references a single pass using cat with zeros as the fastest method. If you need random data, it might be quicker to use OpenSSL instead of /dev/urandom (see the tips and tricks section for dd). — mchid, Apr 26 '22 at 18:58
Where are you returning it? Can you have them agree that the drive is so broken that you can't securely erase the drive and ask if they will allow you to destroy it before returning it? The fastest way to securely dispose of hard drive is to drill holes in it . — Nmath, Apr 26 '22 at 22:42
Gnome disks will overwrite the disk with zeros. For me it takes about an hour for 30GB. — C.S.Cameron, Apr 27 '22 at 14:21

Fastest and effective way to make data unrecoverable on a 1TB external USB drive

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