disk wipe for USB disks
- From: GS <user@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 16 May 2012 15:18:53 +0100
I wanted to wipe an old 100GB USB maxtor hard drive before chucking it and thought I'd use Sysinternal's sdelete but although it started promisingly enough at about 20MB/sec (about as good as USB2 gets IME) it soon started slowing down and was soon reporting only 5MB/sec, with the % complete indicator sitting at 5% for what seemed like forever.
This seemed no good as it was going to take several hours to finish and I wanted to go home so I had a root around online and decided to give the free Diskwipe program from www.diskwipe.org a go. It zero-filled the disk at a consistent 23MB/sec and the whole job was done in an hour, so if anyone needs such a utility it's worth a look, it can not only zero-fill but do random data and all the tinfoil hat stuff too.
Only drawback is it starts by reformatting the disk before wiping it, and this being under WinXP it gagged on trying to do a FAT32 format on a 100GB disk and insisted on using NTFS instead. Since I was chucking the disk this didn't matter but if you needed to keep FAT32 for compatibility purposes then you'd need to do another format afterwards using some other utility.
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