cCleaner Wipe Free Space Takes Very Long Time

[regner]

I've used cCleaner for several years and think it's great.  I used Wipe Free Space for the first time (simple overwrite, 1 pass) and it eventually told me it would take 19 hours to complete.  Is that what I should expect to wipe free space?

 

I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium, 64 Bit, 3.10 GHz with a 1 TB hard drive.

 

 

[mta]

the last time I low-level formatted a 500GB hard drive, I think it took something in the order of 8 hours.

so doubling that to make it 1TB, then 19h hours is in the ball park.

 

a Windows format writes 0's and the WFS of CC writes 1's (or vice-versa, or random, or whatever), the point being, the process of formatting or wiping would be the same timings.

[Augeas]

I guess it depends on how much of the 1tb disk is free space.

 

WFS is, I assume, a more intensive process than a low-level format. Firstly (if Drive Wiper is used, or Wipe MFT checked) CC requests the file system to create enough small files to fill the MFT then to delete them. There may be tens or hundreds of thousands of files created and deleted.

 

The actual free space wiping requires a similar process - Fill  the disk with files until it is full then delete them. It's an easy process to describe but there's a huge amount of work for the file system.