determining factor in time it takes to WIPE drive

[wpshooter]

I have some old 40GB hard drives that I have been using Killdisk to WIPE everything off of them. Yes, I know that there are other programs to use to do this function.

On most of these drives it has been taking Killdisk about 30 to 40 mintues to WIPE them.

But this morning I ran into one on which it took Killdisk over 3 hours to complete the WIPING.

Is the length of time that it takes to WIPE a drive dependent on how much data is stored on it in addition to the actual potential storage size of the drive ?

Thanks.

 

[Nothinman]

It shouldn't be because you're writing data to every bit on the drive whether there's data there or not.

 

[wpshooter]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
It shouldn't be because you're writing data to every bit on the drive whether there's data there or not.

Then, can you offer any suggestions as to why it took this one drive over 3 hours compared to 30 minutes for the others ?

Same brand of drive IBM deskstar 40gb, and both machines are the same model of IBM model 6790 11U. Also, same amount of memory 512mb. Same processor Intel 1.6 on both.

And after I WIPED the first time which took over 3 hours, I went back and made another session on it and the second time around it took less than 30 minutes.

Thanks.

 

[imported_wired247]

Maybe it spent some time getting confused / failing to zerofill over bad sectors ... shrug