Wipe 1.5 TB external drive - how long?

[scanreg]

about how long do you think it would take to wipe a 1.5 TB external drive?

 

i tried the native windows format, but hours later i couldn't tell whether anything had gotten done

 

thanks

[mta]

either using CC to wipe it or Windows, 1.5TB woudl take a long time.

 

sounds like you have tried Windows, but did you try Quick Format?

also try Control Panel, Admin Tools, Computer Management, Disk Management, you can delete the volume and re-initialise it.

 

(warning is you'll lose data but i'm guessing you already know that since you want to wipe it anyway.)

 

also, any 'wipe' method will still have a chance of data recovery. so if you are wiping to make sure your data can't be retrieved, your level of wiping corresponds to the effort needed in recovery.

 

the last time a did a low-level format was on a 120 or 160gig drive(that sort of size) and it took hours and hours.

i'd estimate a 1500gig would need somewhere like a day to do.

[Tasgandy]

I recently used CCleaner's Drive Wiper on a 750GB SATA drive and it took just over 7 hours, so get in plenty of coffee or ................................

 

So unless you need to do a drive wipe for security reasons (data recovery still possible as previously stated by mta) just do a standard format.

[Augeas]

Just in case there's some confusion from the previous two posts, if you use CC Drive Wiper then select one pass only, which is what M/S does in its full format.

 

To quote Microsoft. 'By default in Windows Vista, the format command writes zeros to the whole disk when a full format is performed.'

 

Which to use? I would try Windows full format if you're on Vista or above, CC if on XP.