Wiping external USB 2.0 HDD for resale without it taking forever?


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There are plenty of ways to "wipe clean" a hard drive so that it's ready for resale but I've noticed that when performing them on an external USB 2.0 hard drive, they take way, way too long.

 

Any ideas?

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well for starters yeah usb 2 is SLOW ;) How many times are you writing each sector, are you doing multiple passes? There is really no need to do that.. You can write zero one time and you good.

What disks are you dealing with exactly - can you not pop them out of whatever they are in and connect them with usb3 or directly with sata, etc. Then you should get much better write speeds.

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A single pass wipe will suffice. If you're finding it slows down periodically that could point to imminent drive failure or bad/weak sectors. Try seeing if you can read out the smart data (I use HDD Guardian here). It will show you if there's any reallocated or pending sectors.

 

If there was any sensitive data on it I'd suggest running a ATA secure erase on it as certain block wipe tools (like DBAN) don't erase bad sectors. These can still hold data. My wipe procedure involves booting into Parted Magic and first doing a secure erase. This wipes every part of the disk including bad sectors and can run a bit faster as it's running from the drive's firmware. Then I can run a single pass wipe with nwipe to block write to the entire disk.

 

Parted Magic also has a smart check tool.

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What are you using currently? 

I can't remember. I attempted it a year ago and gave up due to the amount of time it was taking (the estimated time of completion was several days).

 

well for starters yeah usb 2 is SLOW ;) How many times are you writing each sector, are you doing multiple passes? There is really no need to do that.. You can write zero one time and you good.

What disks are you dealing with exactly - can you not pop them out of whatever they are in and connect them with usb3 or directly with sata, etc. Then you should get much better write speeds.

It's a Samsung Story drive. I don't want to dismantle it.

 

Once over is fine. Basically, as long as general file recovery software such as Piriform's Recuva struggles to come up with anything, I'm happy.

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Yeah I would just delete the partitions, then create a new one and use sdelete -z driveletter: should be really fairly quick..

Then sure run something like recuva on it an see if you see anything..

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Yeah I would just delete the partitions, then create a new one and use sdelete -z driveletter: should be really fairly quick..

Then sure run something like recuva on it an see if you see anything..

So far it has been on 0% for 6 minutes. This is going to take a while, it seems.

 

The drive is in flawless condition, by the way.

 

EDIT: It took 9 minutes, so I guess 900 minutes/15 hours. Basically, too long. So I cancelled.

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Ok so I took a crap pata 500gb disk I had on my self, connected with usb pata/sata adapter, etc.

Started it at 11, its now 12:30, at 31% so lets do math ;) 500GB x .31 = 155GB / 1.5 hours 103GB/hr, So for your 1TB your looking at about what 10 hours.. Lets say it took 24 hours, why is that too long??

Again USB is SLOW!!! And your on 2 even, if you want it done fast then your going to have to connect to the disk with something faster than usb.. Or just wait it out... From speed I am seeing on my old disk with usb 2 connection your less than 12 hours.

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