Drive Wipe: Gutmann

CCleaner for Windows
1

I attempted to do my first free memory wipe using CCleaner today. The first progress bar took less than an hour then suddenly the second appeared and this is the result: http://imgur.com/5kdXLiJ

I can appreciate that the Gutmann performs 35 passes but honestly I feel it would just be easier backing up data and doing a full wipe using a neodymium magnet or just buying a new drive altogether. Is it normal for this to take so long?

What is unusual is after cancelling and checking using Recuva no recoverable files were found. So I am confused now. Please note I did allow the first progress bar to complete, this second one just isn't going to happen as my comp is NEVER on for that long and the drive being inactive for so long would be unacceptable.

2

35 Guttman and anything above "1 secure" is useless to do on a modern drive. As you saw it takes much fewer than the 35 to make data unrecoverable and each wipe lowers the life span of your harddrive.

Just set the wipe to 1 secure and you should be fine

3

Hello Helix123 - I recently performed a SATA secure erase on a 1TB hard drive, which is basically a single pass which writes zeroes to all of the disk's sectors, and it took 3 hours and 45 minutes to complete. Using that as a reference, if you were to perform a wipe on the same disk using the Gutmann method, it would take about 5.5 days to complete!