Wipe free space on HDD's for speed?

[Compman55]

On regular hard drives (not SSD's) is there any benefit aside from a security standpoint to wipe the free space?

Will it improve speed at all?

 

[Essence_of_War]

What do you mean by 'wipe the free space'? Do you mean overwrite with zeros anything that you delete? Because no, that will not do you much good.

Other than not filing it to capacity, and potentially trying short stroking (which is related anyway), there isn't really a magic pill to improve hdd perf.

 

[Deders]

nope

 

[Compman55]

Piriform offers a cccleaner with a free space wipe, and also another program called recuvva which has these options as well. It beleive it is more from a security standpoint, but was hoping for maybe a little speed increase.

 

[imagoon]

It barely effects SSD's outside of benchmarks, HDDs erase and rewrite everything anyway so it has no effect.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

nope, defragmentation will help, but windows does that automatically in the background since vista.

 

[Cerb]

Piriform offers a cccleaner with a free space wipe, and also another program called recuvva which has these options as well. It beleive it is more from a security standpoint, but was hoping for maybe a little speed increase.

Nope, no speed. Just security and CYA.

CCleaner, with those options, covers a lot of area in between risking that some lingering documents may have some competitive or regulation-covered information, and booting DBAN .

 

[corkyg]

Any residual data left in "free space" of a HDD is not looked at, so it makes no difference in speed. The positive reason is for security.