SafeErase - How to estimate how long it would take to erase (delete) a whole computer
Last updated on February 14, 2013When deleting an entire computer using the “Highest Security” setting, a customer with a 100GB hard drive will be faced with the following scenario: with the “Highest Security” selected, that means the drive will be overwritten 35 times, meaning 3.5TB of data has to be written. Working under their prescribed approximation of a write time of 1GB per minute, we would expect this to take 58 hours. This process can take longer if there are errors (bad sectors, etc.) on the drive. Of course these figures are nominal and depending on the drive specifications (rotational speed, on board cache, data density, etc...), can go to marginally better to much worse.
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