About 2 hours ago, SDelete (sdelete -z) reached 100% - at least that's what it says:
But since then, the disk is >90% busy and the average response time is very high. Write speed is at ~ 7 MB/s. I believe it was at 27 MB/s when SDelete started.
asked Mar 20, 2023 at 18:12
Add a comment
|
2 Answers
It is flushing the cache - either its own one or the one of the operating system.
The figure "100%" probably appears when all write commands have been successfully issued. Especially when the application is about secure deleting, the 100% should appear after total completion.
-
15+ GB of cache? As you can see in the Process Monitor log, the writes are non-cache. Commented Mar 20, 2023 at 19:02
-
Also in this description on how SDelete works it says that SDelete uses non-cached file IO. Commented Mar 20, 2023 at 20:37
-
According to your source, SDelete does not only process the clusters that contain data. It has to process every free MFT entry. The percentage counter is probably only referring to the deletion of the content of free clusters.– r2d3Commented Mar 21, 2023 at 7:43
The main reason why it is so slow is because you're using the old version 2.0 of SDelete. Version 2.04 is much faster.
For version 2.0: using ProcessMonitor, you can see that it's still writing.
The file size that Process Monitor reports corresponds to the used disk space (if the disk was empty).
The drop in throughput is explained by the constant rotation speed of the disk. The disk is written from the outside (where you have a long circumference) to the inside (where you have a short circumference).
So, just wait until the program exits and don't look at the percentages it reports.
answered Mar 20, 2023 at 18:12