Wiping a hard disk in 2008

I used to be a big fan of various wiping utilities such as DBAN and wipe. However, as hard disk capacities have grown much faster than hard disk speeds I’m feeling like elaborate wiping methods take too long to run. There has been some discussion as of late that fears about being able to recover data from a hard disk that had been overwritten were largely irrelevant with modern hard disk technology. I think the solution is to use encrypted disks by default whenever possible and to wipe disks by simply zeroing them. I took a 400GB disk and zeroed it yesterday and the process took somewhere between 5 and 6 hours to complete and that’s just for 1 pass of writing zeros. The idea of multiple passes using random data means at least a day’s worth of effort if not more depending on the number of passes. Although I could setup an old PC in my basement to take on the task I’m not sure it’s worth the money spent on the electricity. So I will practice using the dd if=/dev/zero method of wiping disks for now.