a disk wiper since shred is "lentoinculo" on some machines
with this the old machine has achieved ~100MB/s instead of shred's ~10MB/s
this should be somewhat less secure than shred's better randomness, but at least the random seed is changed at every pass of random wiping, which for my use case is acceptable.
this should not give you peace of mind regarding the complete wipe of your disks, this is more a "decommissioning" tool for old disks that could be reused in other scenarios and need to be wiped.
if you are after complete certainty of data removal from your drives then it's better to get going with the power drill, grinder and the very big hammer, for more info on how the GCHQ would achieve that: https://media.ccc.de/v/camp2015-6799-how_to_destroy_a_laptop_with_top_secrets
./wiper.sh sdb
in case you want to override the disk health check to wipe a broken disk:
./wiper.sh sdb --override
apt install pv smartmontools
"[some] disks don't fail, they just break"