Unused "C" drive space

[Mipper]

Will CCleaner clean all unused disk space?

[Nergal]

Using the Wipe Freespace feature, you can wipe unused disk space. . . but it's a measure you should only do if/when you are selling a harddrive; as running it often, or with a high(er than 1) pass amount, will drastically reduce the life of your Hard Drive

[kroozer]

. . . but it's a measure you should only do if/when you are selling a harddrive; as running it often, or with a high(er than 1) pass amount, will drastically reduce the life of your Hard Drive

Guess I'm missing something cos I don't see how occasional wfs can be detrimental to the HDD.

 

1. The actuator arm assembly will not suffer more wear, cos it's nearly motionless during the wipe of a defragged disk.

2. The circuitry will not wear unless overheated, which likely won't occur if the wipe runs only a few hours under normal temperatures.

3. The magnetic surface should not decay (if any), with periodic overwrites anymore than from normal usage.

 

For me the primary benefit from wfs is cleaning up the list of dead files found by Recuva, and greatly decreasing Recuva scan time. Following my last wfs Recuva auto-omitted running stage 2 and posted only six files! This certainly is a plus for occasional CC wfs.

[Nergal]

3. The magnetic surface should not decay (if any), with periodic overwrites anymore than from normal usage

 

This is exactly what occurs. on a three pass write of information (zeros or random. . . what ever) over (say) 120 GB the amount of writing is a huge amount thus reducing the "normal usage" lifetime of a drive

[kroozer]

OK, I should have added into my post that my overwrites are single pass. But still, a 3-pass overwrite every few months should hardly impact disk life.

[Nergal]

OK, I should have added into my post that my overwrites are single pass. But still, a 3-pass overwrite every few months should hardly impact disk life.

All-in-all you are correct, it's just kinda my boilerplate warning from the days when people were 32-passing their WFS and also based upon the long arguement about if ccleaner's secure wipes (at higher than 1-secure) were useful or useless.

[Winapp2.ini]

a secure 32 pass WFS on my 1.5Tb drive every day...... Only takes 14 hours

[Alan_B]

a secure 32 pass WFS on my 1.5Tb drive every day...... Only takes 14 hours

It is not the size of your drive,

but how much is unused.

 

It would only take 5 minutes on my 1 TB drive,

if I had yielded to Microsoft Update's incessant demands to fill it up with Bing Toolbars and all the other junk I always forbid ! ! !

[Augeas]

Following my last wfs Recuva auto-omitted running stage 2....

Are you sure? I've never known Recuva to do this. Perhaps it ran very quickly, with only six files to beat up.

 

Following my last wfs Recuva .... posted only six files!

Now that's interesting. OK, to me it's interesting. As far as I know Recuva in Normal mode will scan the MFT and report on deleted file records. After a WFS there will be six (in this case) file records with very large data run lists, but all the other MFT records will still be present, even if they point to subsequently overwritten clusters. So why doesn't Recuva show these? I'm not sure what Recuva option would supress these entries. Not zero length, as they aren't, not system files, as they aren't... Securely Overwritten? It doesn't really fit but it's the only one left. Or perhaps Wipe MFT was run, and Show Zero Byte Files unticked?

 

One thing's certain, I'm not going to run WFS to test it.

 

Another reason could be that your MFT is on the verge of bursting into another allocation, and you actually only have six records available. Delete some junk now!

[kroozer]

Another reason could be that your MFT is on the verge of bursting into another allocation, and you actually only have six records available. Delete some junk now!

Because Recuva's stage 2 scan took such a long time I've been using the cancellation trick you kindly shared awhile ago. So after wiping free space and mft I wanted to time the stage 2 scan and sat here with stop watch in hand. I was not surprised when the speed of the first scan was only a few seconds. But then suddenly the results appeared without a stage 2 scan.

 

I checked Recuva's speed just now by rescanning C partition. Stage 1 took 8.3 secs, stage 2 took 4.1 secs. It hasn't creeped up much since last week's wfs.

As you can see, there's plenty of free space. Have a Celeron 440 with 2GB RAM in an emachine box, Vista SP2 32-bit.

[Augeas]

I thought that wipe MFT created small but not zero length files, so even if you have Show Zero-length Files unticked it should still show all those small files.

 

Vista allocates the MFT in 200 mb chunks, so I suppose it is possible that you only had six records left, but unlikely. I once caught my MFT with only three records free, but quickly freed up some files to give it breathing space.

[kroozer]

I thought that wipe MFT created small but not zero length files, so even if you have Show Zero-length Files unticked it should still show all those small files.

My settings.

[Augeas]

Ah, when you run Recuva, how many files does it say Ignored? It would have been interesting to have had that number when you ran WFS, but too late now.

 

This is some hijack of Mipper's thread, but I suppose it has some connection.

[kroozer]

OK, so if I ☑ tick the top three items it will always show more files, which I don't want, so I'll probably leave 'em default -- ☐ unticked.

 

This is some hijack of Mipper's thread, but I suppose it has some connection.

Maybe just a gradual drift but not yet out-of-bounds.