Formatting and Zeroing Out Data?

[Panzo]

just a lil information needed here. It seems to me that everytime i format and zero out my external harddrive the time needed to zero it out gets longer andd longer, the first time took roughly 3 hours, then it jumped to 5 and now its at 7 hours. is this normal??? why is this happening am i damaging the drive by zeroing it out?

 

[moral-hazard]

just a lil information needed here. It seems to me that everytime i format and zero out my external harddrive the time needed to zero it out gets longer andd longer, the first time took roughly 3 hours, then it jumped to 5 and now its at 7 hours. is this normal??? why is this happening am i damaging the drive by zeroing it out?

What are you using to zero it? You may be selecting different zeroing algorithms. There are alot of different ways to fill the drive (some use randomness), and there is also usually a choice of how many "passes" to make at the drive. Some just make one pass, others make more than five. Each pass takes a long time, so changing how many passes will drastically alter the time used.

You are almost certainly not damaging it. But why are you zeroing? You don't need to zero it unless you are giving it away or selling it and want to wipe confidential data. Otherwise, just format it.

 

[Panzo]

im using the single zero pass with the disk utility.

 

[Matek]

Like moral-hazard said, zeroing out your drive like this is bad and completely unnecessary. Unless you're selling the drive, format and forget.

 

[Tumbleweed666]

. is this normal???

No, its definitely not normal to repeatedly format and zero overwrite a hard drive.

 

[Panzo]

No, its definitely not normal to repeatedly format and zero overwrite a hard drive.

what if the aliens can like read formatted partitions, then were all screwed!!!!

Seriously though, thanks wont zero out again. im going to zero out rehab.

Thanks for the quick lessons.