Does Full Disk Wipe using DOD make the driver slower?

[loveranger]

I did a full disk wipe on one my Ipod Nanos using DOD... it took couple of hours to wipe about 5 GB of free space. I noticed that when trying to copy files from Ipod to my C drive, it is extremely slow. It's sending at a rate of ~900kb/s. I don't know whether or not this was the regular rate or maybe because of the free wipe, it caused it to lower?

If I free wipe my Home PC hard drive with DOD, will it make the speed slower?

 

[Joel]

It's a behaviour of flash memory and was discussed at great length on the forum. While erasure will remove traces of data like on a magnetic drive, what happens to the flash media is that it's rewrite speed will be used instead of its write speed. Since the rewrite speed is much less than the write speed due to the need for reprogramming the flash memory, your perceived write speed is lowered.

Magnetic drives do not have this limitation.

 

[loveranger]

OK. I heard that doing free wipe on local drives decreases the life expectancy of that particular drive. Is this true? And by how much degree is it affected? I've only done it once so far on my laptop which had 400GB free space.

 

[Joel]

Not really, from my experience. I think even a once a day unused space erase should not have a significant impact on drive life expectancy. Eraser however can make a drive about to fail tip over to the failed state.

 

[loveranger]

Not really, from my experience. I think even a once a day unused space erase should not have a significant impact on drive life expectancy. Eraser however can make a drive about to fail tip over to the failed state.

I don't understand that statement. Will using Eraser and using full disk wipe using DOD increase the chance of the hard drive to malfunction?

 

[Joel]

I was adding a qualification. Having no increased chance of failure, or a small increase in chance, does not mean the drive will not fail the next instant. Statistics work over averages.