On Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:58:31 +0100, Cynic
wrote:
>On Thu, 09 Oct 2008 17:20:40 GMT, Svenne wrote:
>
>>My internal HDD is 160 gig and external is 250 gig. When reinstalling
>>Windows I put the internal on disk wipe, which takes a minute or so
>>and then go and have a cup of coffee. When I get back it's wiped. I
>>never wipe my external drive because I only use it for backups of
>>documents, streamed media and suchlike that I want to save.
>
>Wiping a HDD consists of writing to every single byte on every sector
>of the disk. To wipe a 160GB HDD will therefore require writing at
>least 160GB of data to the disk. It is most unlikely that your PC
>will achieve a sustained average transfer rate of as much as 100MB/s -
>a more common transfer rate is around the 70MB/s mark for internal
>drives.
>Wiping a 160GB internal HDD will take *at least* half an hour unless
>you have exceptional hardware. Wiping a 250GB external USB drive will
>be an overnight job.
Half an hour is not very long, especially since you don't have to be
there while it is being done. You could wash the dishes in between and
all of the time would have been put to good use. Anyway, I have only
ever wiped the OS partition of 20 gig. I've never wiped the D
partition or my external USB drive. After what you said in your
previous post I'll consider wiping my D partition occasionally, but
I'll never need to wipe my USB drive.
Svenne |