| Walt Mankowski on 4 Mar 2007 14:43:26 -0000 |
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On Sun, Mar 04, 2007 at 08:50:25AM -0500, Walt Mankowski wrote: > * 80 GB is enough data for about a day's worth of DVD-quality video. > How much radio time will you need for that much entropy? I bet it's > a lot longer than a week. I've got 3 days worth of music in iTunes > and it only takes up 5 GB. I thought about this a bit more, and I think my math is a bit off because I didn't take compression into account. An (uncompressed) audio CD is roughly half a gig for an hours worth of music. So 80 gigs would be about 160 hours of CD-quality audio, and that's still close to a week. I think you should consider why they're recommending you fill the disk with random bits. I imagine it's to make it difficult for an attacker to tell the the difference between allocated and unallocated sectors of the disk. Of course there is some pattern to the pseudo-random numbers, but remember a) the period for random(3) is greater than 34 billion, b) as data is written to the disk it will be scattered throughout the sectors and throw off the pattern anyway, and c) there would surely be patterns in the radio stream too (applause, Powder Milk Biscuit ads, etc.). Walt Attachment:
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