Why does eraser need winlogon + Performance Question

R

rashye

New Member
I am trying to use Eraser on a relatively empty 1TB drive just to see how well it works and if anything gets damaged. Two questions:

Can you please give me an idea of how long it will take to erase the unused space. I left eraser running for about 5 hours and got only 2 bars on the progress indicator.

Why does Eraser seem to call the winlogon process so often? Is this normal?

TIA
 
Did you enable cluster tip erasures when you erased unused space? That can take up a lot of time, especially on drives with many files. The majority of time spent on erasing unused space is the unused disk space, which proceeds at a relatively fast rate. Cluster tips however are much slower as the system must open every single file on disk for erasures.

How does Eraser call winlogon? I don't see any reason Eraser would need to call on winlogon for any reason.
 
I did enable cluster tip erasure so I guess I'll just leave eraser running to see how long it takes.

As to winlogon, the reason I asked is that I noticed that it was very active in I/O reads when I started eraser.

Knowing now that cluster tip erasure involves the opening of every file, do you suppose that it is my antivirus program (Microsoft Security Essentials) that is causing this behaviour? In any case, I will experiment by turning off virus checking on my drive and for eraser.exe for the time being and see what happens.
 
I am not sure about antivirus program,but Microsoft Security Essentials consumes more CPU. Remove it once and before using eraser please close all other processes and then use it :roll:
 
Eraser finally finished a complete pass through my drive in about 10 hours (without cluster tip erasure, virus checking on the drive was disabled). I can live with that. I'm going to run Eraser once more with cluster tip erasure enabled just to get off to a clean start.

Overall, this is a great piece of software. Thanks for creating it.
 
Yes, but in addition to that opening files to read/write is comparatively slow, vs. actually writing the file. Therefore, while disabling your anti virus while running the erase should help, I wouldn't expect it to be faster than 2 or 3 times (and it can still take a few hours for cluster tip erasures alone even with the anti virus disabled)

Be careful when disabling your anti virus and take all the necessary standard precautions (unplug LAN cable/wireless connection, don't copy files to your computer etc etc)
 
Just wanted to let you know that Eraser took 26 hours to get through a 1TB USB drive. Not a problem really. There was no overall effects on the performance of the system.

Thanks again for all the support.
 
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