How long to Zero?

Conrad11 · 24 Jan 2007 at 17:25

Hi there,

How long will it take to fully zero a 80GB and a 250GB SATA Drive?

Thanks.

LewisStuart · 24 Jan 2007 at 18:57

~20mins & ~1hr

Conrad11 · 24 Jan 2007 at 19:48

LewisStuart said:
~20mins & ~1hr

Are you sure, i remember doing one now long ago for an 80GB SATA and it took hours?

manic_man · 24 Jan 2007 at 19:51

MHDD is a good tool for zero-ing i have often found it to be quicker than most manufacturers tools, whilst working with basically every single drive and controller out there

(allows AAM and lots of other low level attributes to be changed too.)

Using BIOS access (i.e. full drive speed) it does my 200GB maxtor in about an hour and a half, the maxtor tool a) doesnt detect nforce4 sata drives

(or it didnt) and b) took 2 hours to do a mates 120GB drive a year or so back.

Conrad11 · 24 Jan 2007 at 19:59

Yeah i have NF4

manic_man · 24 Jan 2007 at 20:02

try MHDD then

While its a bit daunting at first, just type "help" into the prompt (download the bootable ISO and burn it to a CD-RW or whatever) and the commands are all well explained. Even if its no quicker, it works with basically any drive and is generally just a very useful tool.

Conrad11 · 28 Jan 2007 at 11:54

Are there any programs to zero a drive within windows?

rpstewart · 28 Jan 2007 at 12:36

You'd be better off with one that works from a bootable ISO, that way you can remove all the disks that you want to keep to prevent them being accidentally wiped.

wombleboy05 · 3 Feb 2007 at 11:21

Is there anywaay to check if the drive is broken with this tool?

shortone · 3 Feb 2007 at 11:57

Whats the advantage of Zeroing a drive as opposed to just formatting ? Is it just to remove any chance of accessing old data ?

[TR]SweetSpotOz · 3 Feb 2007 at 12:26

wombleboy05 · 3 Feb 2007 at 12:29

markyp23 said:
Took me about 3.5 hours to write my 200GB hard drive with zeros.

To the poster just above this - writing with zeros doesn't really stop your data being readable as if you've really got something to hide it can be brought back again even after a few overwrites. Not sure how effectively though.

Surely if you are zeroing a drive it cant, because you are reseting the drive back to default?

rpstewart · 3 Feb 2007 at 12:48

wombleboy05 said:
Surely if you are zeroing a drive it cant, because you are reseting the drive back to default?

Zeroing the drive doesn't fully overwrite the underlying data. When each zero is written only most of the magnetic domains representing the bit however some will still represent the original data.

If you want the scary details, there's a good article from a guy at Auckland University