Disc Utility > Erase Free Space...?

[mauly]

I selected the single pass. Its been going on for friking age's and is slowing my Mac down so much!!

Its "Creating Temporary File" how long should this normally take? sure glad I didn't do the 9 pass one (or what ever it was)

Should I just skip it?

 

[mkrishnan]

Do you understand what it does? Why on earth did you do it if you aren't willing to wait for it to finish?

If you need it done, go away from your computer for the night and let it get its job done. If you don't need it done, why are you doing it?

 

[dpaanlka]

Why would you want to do that.

It's writing zeros to your entire hard drive. As in, creating a 90gb or 120gb file or whatever size your hard drive is.

 

[mauly]

Do you understand what it does? Why on earth did you do it if you aren't willing to wait for it to finish?

If you need it done, go away from your computer for the night and let it get its job done. If you don't need it done, why are you doing it?

Why are you talking down to me!? Its been going on know for about 4 hours, I beleive that I'm being patient enough.. I am willing to wait for it to finish!

Do I understand what it does! To help prevent recovery of deleted files, click the Erase Free Space button. Seems fairly self-explanatory. Have I done this before, No! do I know how long it takes, No!

For all I know to Erase may only take 5 minutes to complete... which a MF member could mention, therefore I would skip!

 

[dpaanlka]

You only need to prevent recovery of your own files if your selling or giving away your computer (or throwing it in the trash). But in this case, a much better option would be to reformat the entire hard drive (including writing the zeros) and reinstalling a fresh OS. It usually only takes 10 minutes or so that way, because the system doesn't have to carefully tip-toe around files you want to keep (files are usually written in many random places on the disk), but rather writes a straight line of zeros. I did a 90gb hard drive recently this way, and it took like 10 or 15 minutes.

Why do you want to prevent yourself from seeing your own files?

SIDENOTE: My 1,111th post!

 

[mauly]

You only need to prevent recovery of your own files if your selling or giving away your computer (or throwing it in the trash). But in this case, a much better option would be to reformat the entire hard drive (including writing the zeros) and reinstalling a fresh OS. It usually only takes 10 minutes or so that way, because the system doesn't have to carefully tip-toe around files you want to keep (files are usually written in many random places on the disk), but rather writes a straight line of zeros. I did a 90gb hard drive recently this way, and it took like 10 or 15 minutes.

Why do you want to prevent yourself from seeing your own files?

SIDENOTE: My 1,111th post!

Not sure why I'm doing it really... just saw it there and thought it wouldn't do any harm! Thanks for the advice, I'm going to skip! its boring me now anyway!! lol

 

[mkrishnan]

For all I know to Erase may only take 5 minutes to complete... which a MF member could mention, therefore I would skip!

Since you seem like a very intelligent individual, multiply the amount of free space on your hard drive by your hard drive's write speed and you should understand why you're getting what you're getting. It's certainly not going to be fast.

 

[howesey]

If you are conscious set the trash to securely remove data when you empty it, or use the shread command in terminal. This will over-write the files with 0's just like what you have done.