20 days?

[Blizz]

I have a 1.5 Terabyte hard drive, with 203 Gigabytes of free space. And Eraser has been running for 2 hours and just got to 0.01%, and it estimates it will take 20 days to complete, is this true? I really hope that it really won't take this long, if I stop running it at any time I would assume it picks off where it left off, since it overrides on the spot.

All I want to know is if this is normal, I also think its worth mentioning its only doing 1 pass, help me out?

 

[DavidHB]

Free space erasing does take a long time, and 1.5 Terabyte is a big disk, but 20 days is much too long for a single pass wipe!

If you have an estimate, you are presumably using Eraser 5.x (Eraser 6, probably wisely, does not provide this information). My immediate thought is to ask how the drive is connected; is it by any chance an external USB drive? I know that USB ports can sometimes revert from USB 2.0 to USB 1.1; this is an issue I sometimes get with the front ports on my desktop. In any case, as drive hardware and connections are the limiting factors in free space erasing, that is where you need to look.

David

 

[Joel]

I believe Eraser 6 estimates the time for you too. The 20 days may be for cluster tips erasures. Cluster tip erasures may be significantly longer than free space erasures if the files on your disk are small and numerous (e.g. my C: drive has > 220k files; the cluster tip erase takes way longer than my free space actual) If so, depending on how large the disk and the number of files present, such long erasures may be possible.

v6 however will refine the estimate with time, so hang in there for a few hours and see how it goes.