Actually, there is a better way to do this that is fully DOD approved.

For the past several years, almost all IDE hard drives have had an
INTERNAL TO THE DRIVE "wipe the entire drive" command. This wipe is
EXTREMELY secure, and isn't done by the computer that the drive is
connected to, but rather by the drive itself (once the command is issued).

A professor (Gordon Hughes) at UCSD (Univ. of Calif. San Diego) has
produced a PC program (command line (DOS), I think) that will do such an
erase on a PC, it's called HDDerase and a web search should find it.
There have been a couple of articles on C|Net or Infoworld about this
feature also. The feature has been around for a surprisingly long time,
virtually all IDE and SATA drives have it, but the PC community is
surprisingly ignorant of it.

[I THINK that HDDerase has an option to issue the command to every drive
in the PC at once]


S.Lewis wrote:
....does anyone know of a utility that will DoD (or even simple 0's
overwrite) multiple hard drives in parallell rather than sequentially
(thereby saving considerable time)?

In a perfect world, the utility would need to work with IDE/SATA/ and
SCSI.....

Yeah, asking a lot I know. Please post a link if you've seen anything like
this.

Thanks,

Stew