Time to Erase

J

Joe420

New Member
I've ran a gutman 35 on one drive and there is a huge time frame difference to some of the partitions, none of the partitions are operation partitions this is a storage drive. Yesterday some of the partitions only took a few hours but this partition on the outer edge of the disk is the same size as the one done the night before and it's currently been running for 8-10 hours and has 13 hours left on its clock. Did the other partitions not get whipped?
 
Are you erasing its files or unused space? You sound like you are erasing files, if that is the case then the time required is the size of the files on the disk, not the size of the partition.
 
I erasing unused space on a drive that had files deleted on it. so its just the size of files then? I just thought it was strange that some drives only took a hour and this one is taking this length of time.
 
For unused space, the time required is the free space on the drive multiplied by the number of passes. This is the main erasing bit. However, for NTFS file systems, there is a section at the end where unused MFT entries are erased by creating dummy files. The time required is the number of unallocated MFT entries on disk. FAT is a little faster as its got a specialised algorithm.
 
Joel Both partitions are 140gigs and both are NTFS and both erased by the same algorithm one has taken forever to do guthman and the other partition only took a hour or so...
 
And they have the exact same amount of unused space? This must discount the space for system restore.
 
Hi joel, I have several large hidden files on the drives that are slow, old system volume information folders from my other PC. would this be slowing things down? do you know of a way to erase these folders? I can change access to them but each have sub-folders with many folders in them that are all access controlled, taken ownership of all these folders is tedious work...
 
The normal way to get rid of old restore points (which is, mostly, what is stored in System Volume information) is to delete them in Windows. CCleaner has a neat utility to get rid of all but the current restore point. Alternatively, you can switch off System Restore for the drives in question, which will delete the Restore data; I generally do this for non-system drives.

Particularly if shadow copies as well as System Restore was enabled, the Restore points may contain private data, so it may be worth erasing free space after you have cleared them.

David
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top