mdcato
commented
4 years ago First, the time you are getting is not unusual. Even if the 80GB drive could keep up with sustained SATA-III speeds (it cannot), it would take 2.22 hours to do a single 80GB write pass (without verification).
Here’s the speed breakdown: Processor, very fast, for example 3.2GHz (assuming older test computer). Simplifying to a single core, even if the processor has multiple, it can get a lot of work done. Memory is slower than processor speed, which is why processors have caches that run faster than memory. PCIe bus to connect processor & SATA-III controller is ~1000MB/s for PCIe 3.0 x1 (circa 2010, I’m assuming a not-brand-new test computer to run nwipe) SATA-III is 6Gbps, or 600MBps, which is the speed a single data transaction can be transferred to the hard drive’s cache (not the data platters themselves). While none of the spinning drives can truly keep up with writing a continuous 600MBps, many mfrs “updated” their previous models by putting a faster controller, so the underlying “raw” speed wasn’t increased. (Before anyone gets too annoyed, this is a reasonable approach since the drive takes the usually intermittent data quickly and lets the bus, memory & processor get back to other things.) The size of the drive’s cache, and the number of simultaneous transactions it’s on-board processor can handle varies by model. Finally, the drive has to decide how to reach the desired block to be written (even though nwipe generally writes large blocks sequentially) move the heads to the right position, and wait for the spinning platter to get the data underneath the head to actually write it.
Those last two items are what take the greatest time. And thus why nwipe spends most of its time showing “syncing” waiting for a signal from the hard drive that it is finished writing. Nwipe can shove out the data, whether zeroing or random, much faster than it can be written.
And in your case, since its been a while since 80GB drives were made (you can hardly find any new spinning drives less 1TB from reputable dealers) I’ll bet it has a relatively small cache, and on-board controller that only handle a few simultaneous transactions. Further, in that length of time it’s seen a lot of use, so the bearings or bushings are worn on both the platter spindle and head arm, so there is a lot of positioning retries (which take considerable time) to [re]locate the proper place to write the data.
From: Joey van Beek notifications@github.com Sent: Monday, September 21, 2020 12:30 To: martijnvanbrummelen/nwipe nwipe@noreply.github.com Cc: Subscribed subscribed@noreply.github.com Subject: [martijnvanbrummelen/nwipe] Nwipe keeps syncing?! (#286)
Hi there, i'm using nwipe for over a month and it works great except for one thing... It keeps saying "syncing". i tried to wipe an 80GB hdd with the "fill zero" method and it took me 4-5 hours to get to 50% with ShredOS and SystemRescueCD i have the same problem as mentioned above!
what causes this and how can i fix this? Greeting from Holland,
~ Joey ~
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JoeyHelmond0492
PartialVolume
Hi there, i'm using nwipe for over a month and it works great except for one thing... It keeps saying "syncing". i tried to wipe an 80GB hdd with the "fill zero" method and it took me 4-5 hours to get to 50% with ShredOS and SystemRescueCD i have the same problem as mentioned above!
what causes this and how can i fix this? Greeting from Holland,
~ Joey ~