Preparing a HDD for resale??
- Thread starter lettuce
- Start date
i did this recently by using dban with default settings and it took 16hours to complete!
not sure how long it should take, but i wasnt expecting it to take that long with there being no estimation and having never done it before. there was no apparent way to stop it midway, and i only have one computer which i couldnt use for the remainder of the day!
was just annoying thats all :>
its probably common for these processes to take that long.
is there programs that do it quicker?
i assume the size of the hd affects the time taken (was a 500gb btw) and there was no errors.
not sure how long it should take, but i wasnt expecting it to take that long with there being no estimation and having never done it before. there was no apparent way to stop it midway, and i only have one computer which i couldnt use for the remainder of the day!
was just annoying thats all :>
its probably common for these processes to take that long.
is there programs that do it quicker?
i assume the size of the hd affects the time taken (was a 500gb btw) and there was no errors.
A zero fill takes 2-3 hours per TB (in my experience...it might depend on hardware, drive speed, data density, etc.). I believe DBAN's default setting makes 7 passes so that's probably ~18 hours per TB.
In theory, a random fill (or fill with actual data) would be more secure to forensic recovery than zero fill but the normal 7-pass method does 0s, 1s and random data I believe.
The problem is that HDD capacity has increased much faster than HDD speed, so larger drives take longer and longer to fill up. SSDs can be wiped near-instantly with a secure erase command (which basically sends a voltage spike to the NAND chips to completely erase the data stored in them). I assume this is pretty secure but even if it wasn't and a few zero/one/random fills were needed, it still wouldn't take that long compared to an HDD.
Of course, the quickest way is to smash it to bits.
In theory, a random fill (or fill with actual data) would be more secure to forensic recovery than zero fill but the normal 7-pass method does 0s, 1s and random data I believe.
The problem is that HDD capacity has increased much faster than HDD speed, so larger drives take longer and longer to fill up. SSDs can be wiped near-instantly with a secure erase command (which basically sends a voltage spike to the NAND chips to completely erase the data stored in them). I assume this is pretty secure but even if it wasn't and a few zero/one/random fills were needed, it still wouldn't take that long compared to an HDD.
Of course, the quickest way is to smash it to bits.
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