Drive Degradation
- Thread starter NetPoo
- Start date
Overwriter
Active Member
Eraser won’t wear out your drive anymore than any other program that has to write the same amount of data to your hard drive.
Of course overwriting data is going to cause more wear than simply removing the header to it but that is unfortunately the price of security.
I suggest you buy a good quality hard drive and plan to replace it in a few years time. Also setting Eraser to a single PRNG pass will prevent excessive wear on your drive.
Personally I wouldn’t worry too much about it unless you use Gutmann’s wipe everyday or something !
Of course overwriting data is going to cause more wear than simply removing the header to it but that is unfortunately the price of security.
I suggest you buy a good quality hard drive and plan to replace it in a few years time. Also setting Eraser to a single PRNG pass will prevent excessive wear on your drive.
Personally I wouldn’t worry too much about it unless you use Gutmann’s wipe everyday or something !
Very conclusive -
Im going to set it just the way you told me to - this erasing thing becomes more a habit than a necessity 8) - he he
By the way, something odd hapenned to me a few hours ago - i dont know if it was originated by eraser or by ccleaner:
- I was deleting some files with eraser. I was also deleting crap with ccleaner. Ccleaner seemed to hang in my recycler deletion so i aborted the operation. I did this several times and started thinking this should be some kind of a bug of ccleaner program.
After a while i noticed that my hard drive was becoming really full, and with no saving files at all. I got worried. Because all of a sudden i had 50 GB i did not know where they had come from 8J
I investigated with the very nice prog treesize and concluded that there were a lot of files in my disk that i had allready deleted - most of them several days or even weeks ago.
The only explanation i can find is that aborting ccleaner while safe deleting recycle bin brougt back those files instead of wiping them. Also maybe the time it was taking wasnot really a bug and i should have had a little more patience and give the program a little more time to complete its job (used the three passage thing).
I deactivated the empty recycle bin option for further use - just in case, to be safe. It was hard work to get my drive to its normal state, not to mention the near heart attack 8)
regards
Im going to set it just the way you told me to - this erasing thing becomes more a habit than a necessity 8) - he he
By the way, something odd hapenned to me a few hours ago - i dont know if it was originated by eraser or by ccleaner:
- I was deleting some files with eraser. I was also deleting crap with ccleaner. Ccleaner seemed to hang in my recycler deletion so i aborted the operation. I did this several times and started thinking this should be some kind of a bug of ccleaner program.
After a while i noticed that my hard drive was becoming really full, and with no saving files at all. I got worried. Because all of a sudden i had 50 GB i did not know where they had come from 8J
I investigated with the very nice prog treesize and concluded that there were a lot of files in my disk that i had allready deleted - most of them several days or even weeks ago.
The only explanation i can find is that aborting ccleaner while safe deleting recycle bin brougt back those files instead of wiping them. Also maybe the time it was taking wasnot really a bug and i should have had a little more patience and give the program a little more time to complete its job (used the three passage thing).
I deactivated the empty recycle bin option for further use - just in case, to be safe. It was hard work to get my drive to its normal state, not to mention the near heart attack 8)
regards
Overwriter
Active Member
Hi NetPoo
I wouldn’t recommend running these two programs at the same time.
I would run Ccleaner and then use Eraser when Ccleaner has finished.
I wouldn’t recommend running these two programs at the same time.
I would run Ccleaner and then use Eraser when Ccleaner has finished.
Overwriter
Active Member
Try performing a full free space wipe with Eraser.
Ok - ill be using the one pass ramdom data overwrite for free space wiping, right?
This is a safe operation in the near 100% of cases, right?
Thou it wont do anything regarding those recovered contents - Windows recognizes them as perfectly active files now
- but no worry, that situation is under control, thou I still have the empty recycle bin option deactivated in ccleaner - just in case 8J
Regards....
This is a safe operation in the near 100% of cases, right?
Thou it wont do anything regarding those recovered contents - Windows recognizes them as perfectly active files now
- but no worry, that situation is under control, thou I still have the empty recycle bin option deactivated in ccleaner - just in case 8JRegards....
Overwriter
Active Member
NetPoo said:
Yes
NetPoo said:
As far as I know, unless you have a faulty hard drive in which case it is going to fail sometime soon anyway.
Don’t worry unnecessarily about Eraser it has progressed tremendously in the lat 6 months or so. I have used it for years without problems and the latest release is the most stable yet. As for excessive wear and tear I certainly wouldn’t worry about it as most modern quality hard drives will handle it.
Just enjoy using Eraser and the security it provides you with.
Ok ive done it wipe free space on vista system drive.
Two strange things happened:
1) Windows defender came out with two warnings about some entries needing aproval to autostart - no description at all about what program was trying to create autostart entries - so I did not allow
2) When eraser reached about 49% free space wiping windows came up with a "drive running out of free space" message. Eraser stopped wiping, deleted temporary files and finished.
I rebooted and saw i had 10 extra GB on my system drive. Everything seems to be normal. Think Ill be wiping free space on my other partitions (6 big ones)
Two strange things happened:
1) Windows defender came out with two warnings about some entries needing aproval to autostart - no description at all about what program was trying to create autostart entries - so I did not allow
2) When eraser reached about 49% free space wiping windows came up with a "drive running out of free space" message. Eraser stopped wiping, deleted temporary files and finished.
I rebooted and saw i had 10 extra GB on my system drive. Everything seems to be normal. Think Ill be wiping free space on my other partitions (6 big ones)
Overwriter
Active Member
1 The windows thing is to do with privileges. You need to run as administrator.
2 I am surprised windows started to warn you at 49% about disk space but there may be other reasons for this.
Pleased to hear it.
2 I am surprised windows started to warn you at 49% about disk space but there may be other reasons for this.
Pleased to hear it.
Overwriter
Active Member
I don’t know, perhaps something like Defense+ on comodo firewall or some other software you have installed.
I only have XP so I cannot comment on Vista problems. You could search this forum for answers as I believe there have been some teething problems with Vista.
I only have XP so I cannot comment on Vista problems. You could search this forum for answers as I believe there have been some teething problems with Vista.
NetPoo I have Tuneup 2008 Utility it has a Disk space explorer and a whole lot of other goodies maybe you should check it out http://www.tune-up.com/products/tuneup-utilities/
I doubt system restore auto cleaned Because i already had done that when I found out about those extra 50 GB (as previously o this thread)
Yes, it had crossed my mind, those autostart entries could be to erase after start due to locking - but it could also be some kind of malware reviving itself from some lost cluster on the disk - you never know with these virus things
Still no sugestion why the wiping caused windows to fill up my disk - maybe the temporary files created by erasing were very large? After ending the program everytihing was normal - even got those 10 GB extra ...
Yes, it had crossed my mind, those autostart entries could be to erase after start due to locking - but it could also be some kind of malware reviving itself from some lost cluster on the disk - you never know with these virus things
Still no sugestion why the wiping caused windows to fill up my disk - maybe the temporary files created by erasing were very large? After ending the program everytihing was normal - even got those 10 GB extra ...
Overwriter
Active Member
NetPoo said:
The file itself is usually called “~erafswd.tmp”