I've noticed something odd: 1-pass wiping of my 3TB external drive takes over three days when the drive is formatted with NTFS - but when I format it with FAT32, it virtually takes only half as long.
Any reason for this? And somehow I'm also wondering why nobody else has noticed - when I search on Google, I find zip about this behavior. Thanks!
(EDIT - not sure if that's relevant, but I'm on Win7-64bit)
NTFS journals the metadata, so that every change (and a cluster overwrite is a change) causes an entry to be written to the journal; and writes a file change log, so that each change to user data is logged. Neither of these facilities is available in FAT file systems. What with writing and managing these circular logs, and checkpointing the volume every few secs, there's a lot more data writes in NTFS.