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I was looking for a comparatively fast way to securely delete a hard drive I intend to sell and I found this in a German Ubuntu wiki:

wipe -q -Q 1 -R /dev/zero -S r -r $PATH

It said that according to contemporary research this would suffice. Is that true? Because it was done in one second:

arno@arno-X55A:~$ sudo wipe -q -Q 1 -R /dev/zero -S r -r /dev/sdb
Okay to WIPE 1 special file ? (Yes/No) Yes
Renaming                         /dev/sdb ->                         /dev/u8jSynOperation finished.
0 files wiped and 1 special file ignored in 0 directories, 0 symlinks removed but not followed, 0 errors occured.

Using the standard wipe command resulted in an ETA of 2 years for my 2 tb hdd.

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If you look at the output of the command you ran, you can see that the wipe command did not in fact do anything, it ignored the hard disk:

0 files wiped and 1 special file ignored in 0 directories, 0 symlinks removed but not followed, 0 errors occured.

The man page for wipe indicates that this is the way to delete entire disks by specifying a special file:

wipe -kqD /dev/sdb

-k indicates that the file /dev/sdb should be kept and that wipe shouldn't attempt to delete it. -q means that wipe will make four passes (considered quick). -D means follow symlinks if /dev/sdb happens to be a symlink.

You can add the other options mentioned in your question, but I think -k would be essential for a special file.

If that still doesn't work, have a look at this question for other methods: How can I securely erase a hard drive?

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