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i erased my 80 gig hard drive, now what?

J

jkaz

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 3, 2004
386
2
Upper Mid West
i have a system files hard drive, and a second hard drive: 80 gigs.

i just recently cleaned it off and erased the partitions. what should i do with it?
 
jkaz said:
i have a system files hard drive, and a second hard drive: 80 gigs.

i just recently cleaned it off and erased the partitions. what should i do with it?
Click to expand...

store files on it? pictures, music, video?

is this a trick question?

i mean if you don't have room in your computer because you replaced the hard drive then pick up a firewire/usb enclosure and make it into an external hard drive -- same idea store things on in
 
jkaz said:
i have a system files hard drive, and a second hard drive: 80 gigs.

i just recently cleaned it off and erased the partitions. what should i do with it?
Click to expand...

If you don't know what to do with it, why did you erase everything?
 
interesting array of response, thank you.


but what i was wondering is if it should be 'zeroed' or have any other
technical application applied to it so that it is 'really clean'
 
jkaz said:
interesting array of response, thank you.


but what i was wondering is if it should be 'zeroed' or have any other
technical application applied to it so that it is 'really clean'
Click to expand...

A regular format is sufficient to get rid of the data. If your paranoid and really think someone is going to take your hd and try to recover you data, zero or 8-way right it for even more security.
 
jkaz said:
interesting array of response, thank you.


but what i was wondering is if it should be 'zeroed' or have any other
technical application applied to it so that it is 'really clean'
Click to expand...

Are you planning on selling it? If not, why bother?
 
thank you again for the response, i think i am at the center of what i'm trying to get at:

for the sake of optimizing performance, is there anything i can or should do to my now empty 80 gig hard drive

thanks!
 
jkaz said:
thank you again for the response, i think i am at the center of what i'm trying to get at:

for the sake of optimizing performance, is there anything i can or should do to my now empty 80 gig hard drive

thanks!
Click to expand...

No.
 
hmm use some soap to get it really fresh and clean???

I don't see your problem, and I'm not alone ;)

whats wrong with having a prefectly empty 80GB HD? lol

I have a 80GB harddisk external on my G5 (and yes the internal is bigger, but I had the external allready when using my B&W...) I used Carbon Copy Cloner to move my system on that one too, as backup & its bootable in case of trouble... (I can't have my system down because of harddrive faillure, I need this every day...) and I put my music on that drive so I can use the other faster one for the real stuff...

as long as it is working and in good shape and big enough (my system is incl. installed software +/-20GB) you can do the same as I did and copy your system on it as bootable backup system drive... in case of...

J

PS: there is nothing you can do to that drive to increase performance, just use it for reliability as I do... you never know when a drive ***** up and the chance of 2 drives to die at the same time is not likely to happen, but if it does: DOH!
 
jkaz said:
interesting array of response, thank you.


but what i was wondering is if it should be 'zeroed' or have any other
technical application applied to it so that it is 'really clean'
Click to expand...
If you want to overwrite it and try to get rid of the old data, grab some 4-16K files, some 100-250K files, and some 1-2MB files.

Just duplicate the small files enough times to fill the drive, then delete them.

Duplicate the files quite a few times, dump them in a new folder -- duplicate the folder several times and dump them in a new folder. Soon you're duplicating 1GB folders.

The medium files, then delete them.

Then the larger files, and then delete them.

This should wipe out most fragments of data left on the drive.

Just make sure you copy files, pictures, or audio that you wouldn't mind having on the drive.

---

If you just overwrite once, you'll see a bunch of 1-4k fragments of your old data on the drive -- since a file reserves sectors but may not use all of the sector.

Hopefully copying stuff with a few different sized chunks will means that only a professional would be able to recover anything -- and hopefully just fragments of the junk files you left on the drive.

Plus zeroing out take forever and a day -- as does the special 8+ times overwrite super data destructo programs.
 
thanks for the respones

i was recently having issues with my hard drives spinning up and down(once every three hours: thanks apple!) so i figured it was maybe time 'clean' the drives.

i have a 60 gig for system, and 80 was for video, etc.

80 is 'clean'

60 is down to almost bare minimums.

i'd like to do an os reinstall, curious about my apple music store purchases

and if all other things are equal, will the machine run faster or smoother on a 60 gig than a 80 gig because of less space to search or other.

thanks!
 
jkaz said:
and if all other things are equal, will the machine run faster or smoother on a 60 gig than a 80 gig because of less space to search or other.
Click to expand...
Generally, no. The 60 gig drive is probably older and/or of lower density, so it's going to be somewhat slower than the 80GB drive. Furthermore, since hard drives get slower as they fill (the first bits of data saved to them are the fastest due to the way data is arranged on the platters inside, and the last are the slowest), even if everything else was equal the 60GB drive would still be slower, since you'd be closer to its maximum capacity. (BareFeats has some interesting comments and tests on this if you're interested in details and statistics--it's called "short stroking".)

Add to that the fact that when a drive is almost full fragmentation increases and performance generally goes down, and you've got yet another reason to stick to bigger, partially empty drives if speed is your primary concern.

All that said, having a seperate drive for your boot disk is a good idea, since that way the system can be reading/writing OS-level data (opening an application, whatever) without tying up the drive that's reading/writing data.

In your case, I'd either just use one drive for backup (preferably automated, for example with CCC), if you don't have enough data to fill either, or put my OS on one drive and keep the data on the second--which to use for which depends on how much is on your boot drive and how much data you intend to be working with. If speed is more important than space, use the 80GB for the boot drive. If you think you'll actually fill 80GB with data, use the 60GB drive for the OS disk.
 
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