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Zero filling harddrives


Shamus_McFartfinger

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Anyone done this recently? What a slooooooooooow process it is. 20 hours it took for a P3/550 to zero fill a 400gig drive. Eager to improve things, I threw another 400gig thingy into a P4/2.4 last night expecting it to be a little quicker.

 

Nope.

 

24 hours later and it?s at 76%.

 

WTF?

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I have never done that mate !! My original HDD is a 40gig, I think my iso HDD is an 80gig one, you are way out of my league....

 

<curious> Is this something you do to check write speed to the HDD or for some other reason mate ? How do you do it ? (Google ??? :lol: )</curious>

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Anyone done this recently? What a slooooooooooow process it is. 20 hours it took for a P3/550 to zero fill a 400gig drive. Eager to improve things, I threw another 400gig thingy into a P4/2.4 last night expecting it to be a little quicker.

 

Nope.

 

24 hours later and it?s at 76%.

 

WTF?

 

In dos mode(pio)/ it doesn't matter what cpu, writing zeros/a low level format is dependent upon the

size of the hard drive. Haven't done one of those in about 4-5 years. I did recover some drives with errors on them then and returned to factory certified condition. After using zap and wipe I never did a low level format again.

Edited by chewy
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Anyone done this recently? What a slooooooooooow process it is. 20 hours it took for a P3/550 to zero fill a 400gig drive. Eager to improve things, I threw another 400gig thingy into a P4/2.4 last night expecting it to be a little quicker.

 

Nope.

 

24 hours later and it?s at 76%.

 

WTF?

When you say "zero fill" do you mean writing zeros to all of the unused space? Edited by Movie Junkie
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Thanks LUK.

 

 

Shamus:

 

With some of those programs you have the ability to change the number of times it writes the zero to each block. With the program I use it can be anywhere up to 255 times. If you have it set to a high number of writes that could be why it is taking a long time to complete.

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<curious> Is this something you do to check write speed to the HDD or for some other reason mate ? How do you do it ? (Google ??? :lol: )</curious>

I used Seagate?s formatting tool and after 30 hours it failed to do what it was supposed to do. *sigh* You can have a bit of a read here if you like. http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/faq...llfmt_what.html

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Did it the other day about 10 times to a hdd I need to RMA with Maxtor.

 

Using my own little HDD Tools program of course ;)

 

Now THERE?S an idea. Why didn?t I think of that? Good thinking, mate. :thumbup:

Didn't take anywhere near as long as your one though - my transfer rate was about 70mb/s

Sounds a hell of a lot better than 2mb/s.

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Of course, it also depends how you're zeroing out the drive. Writing just a zero to every area is faster than, say, the more secure wipe method of writing a 0, erase it, write a 1, erase it, write a 0, and check that the write reads 0, and repeat for 32 passes. :o

 

 

It might just be easier to use something like Partition Magic to safely delete the partition, create a new, blank, unformatted one in the empty space, image the partition, then safely delete the new partition, create a 2nd new blank, unformatted one, and then restore the imaged partition, and safely delete it. :) While it seems like a lot of useless steps, the partition sizes will be small since hardly any data will be used, thus, making the restores, creations, and deletes quick. Plus, creating and deleting multiple partitions to the same area should make it very difficult to recover anything through means beyond electron tunnelling.

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With some of those programs you have the ability to change the number of times it writes the zero to each block. With the program I use it can be anywhere up to 255 times. If you have it set to a high number of writes that could be why it is taking a long time to complete.

 

No choice in the matter with the Seagate tools. It would have been nice if they included code that enabled DMA. PIO might be fine for a 20gig drive but for anything larger it?s a painful experience.

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Didn't take anywhere near as long as your one though - my transfer rate was about 70mb/s

Just got home from work and threw the drive in another machine and started HDD Tools. 30mb/sec. :( Something tells me I need to replace a ribbon cable and have a look for a BIOS update. ETA is 3 1/2 hours. Damn sight f*cking better than 30. Great proggy mate. :)

 

hdd1.jpg

hdd2.jpg

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Don't forget the new 0.0.0.5 version mate ;)

 

30mb/s does kinda suck though mate... there must be something wrong there (as you rightly said!). Mine actually starts off at around 85mb/s and I'd have expected yours to be 65 - 75 if that drive is anything like my ide/sata ones.

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Don't forget the new 0.0.0.5 version mate ;)

Just grabbed it. :)

30mb/s does kinda suck though mate... there must be something wrong there (as you rightly said!).

Yeah. I?ll have a look on the weekend. I can?t see anything in the BIOS that would slow it down.

Mine actually starts off at around 85mb/s and I'd have expected yours to be 65 - 75 if that drive is anything like my ide/sata ones.

I thought they?d be alot quicker as well. The drives are fast enough but seem to have a problem communicating somewhere.

 

(2 minutes later) I?ve just checked the nVidia SATA/IDE driver settings and they?ve been set on auto from the BIOS to DMA33. Gee. I wonder why my drives are slow.

 

(5 minutes later) Getting excessive errors from the drives at DMA133 which is why it defaulted to DMA33. It?s a sure bet my ribbon cable is stuffed. Getting 70mb/sec ATM though. 4am. Bedtime.

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