no_face10

Thanks for explaining. I chose to do the wipe because the 1TB drive only had about 350-400MB of space available even after I deleted about 30GB of files (yes, I made sure my trash was empty and also restarted a bunch of times), so I thought wiping would help clean it up a bit. I can't be sure exactly how much space is actually free on the drive because it seems that 350-400MB was not accurate. In terms of how many passes, I set it to "zero out."

Hello! I've been running Erase Free Space for an external 1TB hard drive for 3 solid days now and it's still not done. I'd read elsewhere that it might take 24 hours, but 72+?! That seems insane to me. The window is not frozen, as I can still interact with it. I checked Mac's "Force Quit Applications" window and CCleaner is not frozen. I have attached a screenshot of the progress window. I just want to know if I should hang in there or force quit. I'm terrified to ruin my external hard drive. Thanks!!