10 hours to perform Schneiers on 300 gig

[iam]

10 hours to perform Schneier's 7 passes on the UNUSED SPACE on 300 gigabyte - wait a minute,
that's not right I shut the damn thing down because I was tired of waiting on it
and there was no way of being able to tell how long
it was actually going to be before it finished.
As far as I know, it was stuck on some locked file in the first gigabyte.

 

[DavidHB]

As far as I know, it was stuck on some locked file in the first gigabyte.

How do you know, or believe, this? The last log message is not a good indicator of what stage the program had reached. What point had the progress bar reached?

The timing is certainly within the range of what I would expect. On a 300GB (and therefore a modern, high-density) drive, there is little or no point in using more than a single pass when erasing free space. The limiting factor in the process is the speed of the drive; a 7 pass erase will increase the erase time by seven times. You can help things along a little by disabling your antivirus for the duration of the erasing task, but that is all. On a production machine, I would normally set a free space erase to run overnight.

David

 

[tommyla]

thats about right, 40gb @ 60 MB/s takes around 2-3 hours, keep in mind that its 7 passes, other types use less like 1-pass
Schneiers is useful if you want to delete small secret files not whole drives, unless you are required to and has to use it!

 

[Joel]

I concur. This topic has been discussed quite a few times over in the Support and Forensics sections.