The process of securely overwriting a large disk is a lengthy one; can the process be expedited?
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The Question
SuperUser reader John wants to know if there is anyway to speed up the disk wipe he’s performing:
Is there anyway to for John to speed the process up?
I’m on Mavericks/10.9.
The Answer
SuperUser contributor Hennes writes:
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Assuming you have USB 2 and a reasonably good performance of 30-35MB/sec. (this is about the max write speed for USB 2)
That is a long time. And speeds can differ somewhat. In your case it seems four times as slow. Decidedly not fast, but well within reasonably speeds. Especially if there are other USB devices busy on the same USB controller.
There are at least three ways to deal with this:
Wait a long time. Use a faster bus to the disk (e. g. an eSATA enclosure. Or mount the disk internally) Do not send any data to the drive to wipe it. Instead tell the drive to wipe itself. Useful for this: DBAN and secure erase.