I was cleaning up an external drive the other day and thought I would give it a once over before using it again, so naturally I used CCleaner and wiped the free space. Worked great, only took 3 hours maybe? Then I decided there was nothing better going on so I ran "wipe the whole drive" now HERE is where my question comes in. Once I selected the whole drive instead of free space, it was up to 5.6 DAYS to do "the same" job. Just to clarify, when I said I cleaned up the drive, I did mean deleting everything after moving to my tower. Now I'm puzzled, why does a "free space" free space wipe take so much less time than a "whole disk" free space wipe? Any help would be great!