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Resolved Hmm. Apparently diskpart 'clean all' is something huge.
- Thread starter PinkyMacGodess
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I don't recognise diskpart as a MacOS command, but in Windows the "clean all" command in Diskpart writes zeroes to the entire disk. So yes, it will take a while to finish. About 320GB per hour I think I read someplace a long time ago but I guess it depends on drive write speed. Aborting won't harm the drive physically and since it no longer contains any usable data anyway... It's safe to abort it if your intention wasn't to overwrite it with zeroes (Secure erase).
Yeah, the next day, after I left it to 'cook' overnight, I found out what it was doing. It's a 'zero write' type of erasure. Writing zeroes over the entire surface. It is a 3 terabyte drive, so I was getting a little concerned when it didn't come up for air. The documentation, and help file, didn't mention a full surface wipe, which I guess isn't unheard of, but figured it was doing a 'full wipe'. Just hitting the 'fool button'. I could see it wasn't wiping the main drive.
(I remember a tech doing a DOD wipe on an old server drive (Why? I don't know. They billed by the hour?) attached to an adapter on his notebook, and then his notebook wouldn't reboot. I haven't laughed that hard in a while...) "That wipe should have taken longer." Yeah, apparently...
