How long should it take to zero an 80GB drive? More than 25 min?

[mattkime]

How long should it take to zero an 80GB drive? Its been 25 minutes and the blue thermometer isn't at the 25% mark yet.

I suspect this drive is garbage.

[Tofer]

It takes a long time. I zeroed my 60gig drive on my powerbook before I sold it, and it took a couple of hours for three passes.

-Tofer

[Racer X]

hours. maybe even overnight if it is an 80GB laptop drive.

[mattkime]

its a desktop drive.

grar. zeroing is a good way to verify a drive. client is getting that at this hour.

[Racer X]

I have had 2 drives be bad from Apple in new machines. They installed the OS over the bad sectors.

Since then, I wipe, and zero all drives before I put them into use. it took months to figure out what the problem was.

[MacMagus]

Zeroing writes zeros to the entire drive. 80GB of zeros.

How long would it take for you to copy 80GB of data? A couple of hours? More?

Leave it overnight.

[Racer X]

it takes longer than just writing 80 gigs of data. not sure why.

[MacMagus]

> it takes longer than just writing 80 gigs of data. not sure why.

'Depends on how you're doing it. It could be writing zeros 3x or 7x or 11x or 35x...

[mattkime]

i was only zeroing once. i'm not sure why it was taking so long.

writing to sectors should, in thoery, map out bad sectors. i think the "write zeros" option does something more intensive to get rid of the intermitent blocks. or maybe thats just what it feels like.

...installing OS X combo update....can't wait to go to bed...

[Racer X]

I think it is a read, write, and read back to each sector. (old SCSI and OS 8 days at least that is what the surface verify did)