The manual is not very clear on the exact function of the Shred menu option. There is already a Delete Partition option and it would be great if Shred were a means of rendering any data on an HDD unrecoverable. However I suspect this is not the case. Could anybody please describe exactly what Shred does?

OK, it seems to do what I was hoping it would, although there is no information on what algorithm is used to shred the partition. It takes around 8 hours per terabyte so it does appear to do a lot of work.