Before Formatting the Partition

• wipe first? This can take a whole day, or more...

• An optimized version would be: wipe -fk -qQ 1 -R /dev/random /dev/part

• But is it really necessary?

• Online HOWTOs say yes (note that most are copied from one another)

• I say totally overkill in my non professional opinion as a non licensed cryptographer :)

• Protecting against known plaintext attacks isn't that useful when you have known filesystem structures at known offsets. Relying on a plaintext attack resistant algorithm is a better route.