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/dev/urandom is far better option. One problem is that writing a full drive of data can take long time vs chucking it into shredder. For example this[1] 22TB drive can do 260MB/s, meaning that doing one full disk write pass would take almost 24h.

[1] https://nascompares.com/2022/09/12/wd-red-pro-22tb-hard-driv...

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What makes it far better? When overwriting a full drive they are about the same.

In the olden days hard disks wrote data on spinning platters the size of dinner plates with heads the size of Sharpie markers, and the controllers were a Z80 microprocessor on a card with a few kB of ROM and maybe as much as 16kB of RAM.

Everything past those days though, the data is very thoroughly scrambled for spectral whitening before being written to disk so there's no practical difference between /dev/urandom and /dev/zero.

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