Wipe and Remove USB drives on Ubuntu via the CLI

For some reason both Windows and macOS lack an easy method in wiping (old) hard disks (the ones with those spinning platters). So I had to do it on my headless Ubuntu server.

Before I forget; use the information below at your own risk. Wiping the data of the disk is pretty definite.

The disks I wanted to whipe were put in a cradle which identified itself as /dev/sdg. The steps I followed were;

1. Identify the correct drive by issueing the following command. This is the most important step, because selecting the wrong disk may cause significant data loss;
   > lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,FSTYPE,MODEL,MOUNTPOINT

2. Wipe the current filesystem / partition table;
   > sudo wipefs -a /dev/sdg

3. Overwrite the complete disk with random data and a final pass with zero’s;
   > sudo shred -v -n 1 -z /dev/sdg

4. Remove the wiped disk safely;
   > udisksctl power-off --block-device /dev/sdg

After step 4, the drive can be removed and a new drive can be inserted and the process repeated.