How long to Zero?

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 :P (or it didnt) and b) took 2 hours to do a mates 120GB drive a year or so back.
 
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.
 
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.
 
Whats the advantage of Zeroing a drive as opposed to just formatting ? Is it just to remove any chance of accessing old data ?
 
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.
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Surely if you are zeroing a drive it cant, because you are reseting the drive back to default?
 
wombleboy05 said:
Surely if you are zeroing a drive it cant, because you are reseting the drive back to default?
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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
 
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