Should it really take 54 hours to "Erase" an 8gb drive?

[TTracey62]

I have a LS220D / 8 GB system and decided to try to reset the box to default and inadvertently selected the Erase option instead of the Reset (assuming it would do both).  The system has now started four passes of overwriting data.   I get that it's security erasing, but should it really take 54 hours to make four passes over 8TB?  Seems like excessively slow performance (which I was trying to correct with the reset).

Has anyone else run the four pass 1s and 0s on a drive?  What was your experience?

Thanks,

Tom

[1000001101000]

I assume you mean 8TB.

Yes, writing that much data to an 8TB sata drive takes that long. You can usually look up the specs of the drive(s) and work out the math of what the best case scenario is for writing the entire drive multiple drives. This can be a little confusing sometimes since capacity is usually listed in Bytes but transfer speed can be listed as either bits-per-second or bytes-per-second.

if you're doing 4 passes of an 8TB drive that is 32TB of writes. If that took 54 hours you get:

(32 terabytes) / (54 hours) = 164.6 MB/s (at least that's what google spits out)

That is about the same speed I typically see from the 8tb drives I own doing that same type of thing.


 

[TTracey62]

Thanks - still seems really slow to me.  I thought that this should be an internal (i.e. - direct write from the device and shouldn't be dependent on network operations) which would make this much faster...

(also - thanks for the catch - I edited my initial post for correctness).

[As3nd0r]

The process is internal,  no network involved, however normal hard discs don't write much faster than that.