[Zim]

Upgraded my HD and decided it wise to erase the one I replaced...

I tossed it into my external firewire case, and fired it up with Disk Utility (or whatever its called these days)..

under options I picked (8-way zero), figuring why not.

Ouch... 4 days later (I do not exaggerate) it finished.

Was it supposed to take this long? Not that I expected it to take 5 minutes, but seems to me I could have copied 40G of data on/off that HD 8 times within a few hours.

Its done, and it remounted (for a while I thought it was a hung process), but curious before I ever try this again.

Mike

[CharlesS]

Yeah, 8-way takes forever.

The only time I'd use that was if you were selling a drive to someone else, and that drive contained extremely sensitive information that you really really didn't want them to see.

[Millennium]

8-way zeroing isn't worth it unless you're selling the drive or otherwise giving it to someone else. If you don't plan on selling it, there's a much faster and much more reliable way of getting rid of the data on a hard drive such that no one can ever get at it again. It's called a sledgehammer.

I'm serious. Even after 8-way reformatting, it's still possible to reconstruct the data on a drive using special scanning tunneling microscopes. Of course, this is so expensive and time-consuming that no one short of government intelligence agencies can really afford to do it, so unless They (whoever They are) are after you, there's not much to worry about. However, it's not really a hard process to put it beyond even Their reach, and truth be told it's kind of fun. Just make really sure you've gotten everything off of the drive first.

[Zim]

Heh, well, like I said I figured it was just a copy-8-times version... which would have been 320G.. I'm not that paranoid now that I know how long it takes

But on the bright side, it is done, and now I know.

Cheers,
Mike