Backup of old Hard Drives

Using the IDE-USB adapter. Use an AU power cable with it, the provided one is not good.

1. plug the power into the hard drive
2. wait for the drive to spin up
3. plug the convertor into the hard drive
4. plug the USB cord into your computer

If the computer detects it, doing lsusb will show an item "JMicron"

After backing up the drive, wipe it.

If the drive is /dev/sdc1 for example, doing "sudo cp /dev/random /dev/sdc1" should fill it with random bytes, however it seems really slow generating the random data.

A secure wipe requires doing this multiple times with different bit patterns, and some programs can do this.

A more practical approach:

sudo apt-get install pv
time dd if=/dev/zero | pv | sudo dd of=/dev/sdc1 obs=1024
time cat /dev/zero | tr '\000' '\377' | pv | sudo dd of=/dev/sdc1 obs=1024
time dd if=/dev/zero | pv | sudo dd of=/dev/sdc1 obs=1024
time cat /dev/zero | tr '\000' '\377' | pv | sudo dd of=/dev/sdc1 obs=1024