Take the tour ×  I was pondering about this, sometimes people
ask me to erase data on their drive. So I use a shredding
program, which takes a long time. However what if instead of
shredding all the files, I'd just use truecrypt to encrypt them.
The disk would be useless then no? Would the data still be
recoverable for someone without the password? It would be faster
no?  I'd use a strong password. I just want to make the data
unusable.  share|improve this question add comment  3 Answers
up vote 11 down vote accepted  Modern research seems to indicate
that performing a single zero-pass of a hard drive is sufficient
for most data dispositions. In which case, no, performing a file
or partition encryption would not be faster. Except in the case
of hardware accelerated encryption (such as the newer Intel i
series processors) encryption speed is CPU bound, whereas a
single zero-pass would be I/O bound. Even in the face of
hardware acceleration, we still run into the problem of
performing an I/O bound function, ma