long duration of single pass normal ? (font size issue)

JackOfAllTrades

New Member
Hello,

I have a 150 Gig drive with about 40 Gig of unused space.
I run the "1 pass" method to clean free space and I started about 4 hours ago, and the status window shows me, that it will take aprox. ten hours more (screenshot).

Is this normal?
(I'm wondering if I accidently selected a multipass method, since I have a large font scale, my dialogs in "Ereaser" are messed up, as you can also see in the screenshot.)

Thanks,
Jack
 

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Which version of Eraser are you using? I thought that the issue with large fonts had been fixed; certainly, Joel is aware of it.

Free space erasing time is very variable, but usually pretty long. Hard drive performance is almost always the determining factor, but I include in 'performance' both the state of the drive (e.g. how fragmented it is) and whether Eraser is being run concurrently with other programs which frequently access the drive (notably your antivirus; try disabling that temporarily). With these factors in mind, your erasing time is longer than I would normally expect, but not impossibly so.

As you are erasing free space on a system drive, Eraser will encounter many, many inaccessible system files as it tries to erase the cluster tips, and this too can slow the system down. You could try re-running the task after disabling the option to erase cluster tips, to see if that makes a difference. I often do this on system drives; in my view, the consequent rather small reduction in user security should be acceptable to most users if it helps get the job done more quickly.

The other possible cause of slowdown is the Task List (which also contains the task logs). If this is very large, and possibly fragmented, access to it may become slow, and Eraser generates a log entry for each of the many thousands of files it cannot access on the C: drive. So clearing large log entries may also help in some circumstances.

David
 
Yes, cluster tips' erasure depends on how many files you have on your computer, not how much free space there is.

The font size issue is fixed in Eraser 6.2, you may have to use a nightly build till then.
 
Joel said:
The font size issue is fixed in Eraser 6.2, you may have to use a nightly build till then.
Thanks, Joel; I'll remember that for future reference.

David
 
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