Different Wiping Speeds for NTFS and FAT32

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.

When you do something wrong - which is always possible,

and when Windows does something stupid - which it will,

ALL of your 3 TB of data may be lost.

If you then run Recuva, you may be able to retrieve your files.

Recuva can only rescue the first fragment of each lost FAT32 file - perhaps enough of your wedding photo to identify location and date :(

Recuva can rescue all the fragments of each lost NTFS file and may successfully put them together in the correct order and rescue your wedding album.

When Windows lost all 6 partitions on my Laptop HDD,

Minitool Partition Wizard was able to retrieve them.

My 4 NTFS partitions were perfectly restored.

Once I had booted into NTFS Windows it insisted that the two FAT32 partitions were damaged and that I had to run Chkdsk on them.

Chkdsk identified and "fixed" (not repaired) a vast number of errors in the FAT32 files.

I suggest you consider whether FAT32 is suitable for your needs.