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DBAN is, to be honest, what I consider to be an industry standard. It's fast, reliable, simple, and flexible.

The speed bottleneck is usually the drive itself, so no other software is going to do the same thing faster. Note also, that you don't *need* to do 3 passes if you don't want to, a single pass is obviously 3 times faster - DBAN is fully configurable so you can do as many passes as you want.

In my opinion 1 single pass is perfectly sufficient. The cost of hardware and expertise required to recover data even from a single pass is immense, and beyond that of even most professional data recovery companies. Multiple passes (i.e. 3-7) are pretty much overkill barring top secret government data (there is a reason for the DoD approved 3/7 pass routines - they are officially sanctioned for top-secret government data) - but what's a few hours of leaving a computer in a rack somewhere and ignoring it?

So to cut it short - 3 passes (the default with DBAN) - perfectly adequate. Any more is over the top, less may be adequate in practice, but may not be legally.