overview for witchergeraltofrivia

Is this speed normal for formatting a HDD? (mint 21.2) in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

This is not recommended for USB connected drives

Is this speed normal for formatting a HDD? (mint 21.2) in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (3 children)

It's connected over USB 3, it's SMR

Is this speed normal for formatting a HDD? (mint 21.2) in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Yes I am overwriting it with zeroes while formatting (using gnome-disks). I didn't know it did multiple overwrites, thought it did 1 pass overwrite with zeros.

Is this speed normal for formatting a HDD? (mint 21.2) in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago

Yup I am zeroing it.

That explains the declining speed. Thanks a lot for the insight!

35

Is this speed normal for formatting a HDD? (mint 21.2) (lemmy.world)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

20 comments fedilink

Started with 50 MBps, went down to 20 MBps shortly after and is declining slowly since. Running for 7+ hours.
HDD is 5 years old, rare use but very well kept.

Edit: external 1.5 TB HDD connected over USB 3. Overwriting with zeroes while formatting using gnome-disks.

Update:

Stopped gnome-disks ~78% and continued writing zeros using dd for the remaining sectors.
command used: #sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 bs=1M seek=1001250 status=progress (don't copy without understanding), used seek here to skip already zeroed sectors.
write speed went up from ~14 MB/s to ~100 MB/s.

slow speed could be caused by multiple passes of overwrites by gnome-disks (not sure if it does that), or by "initializing the filesystem at the same time as zeroing" as mentioned by @ares35.

gradual speed decrement was observed in both methods, as mentioned by @Synthead.

Thanks to everyone for being so helpful.