Benchmarking disk wipes - ArchWiki

# Benchmarking disk wipes

Related articles

- Securely wipe disk
- Frandom
- Benchmarking

Benchmark different methods of disk wiping.

## Frequently asked Questions

### How do I wipe a disk?

See Securely wipe disk.

### Are there other ways to benchmark a disk?

Of course. Take a look at Hdparm.

### How do I get the HDD model with hdparm?

    # hdparm -i /dev/sdX | grep Model

### How do I check progress of dd while running?

See Core utilities#Checking progress of dd while running.

### Benchmarking with dcfldd

Dcfldd doesn't print the average speed in MB/s like good old dd does but with time you can work around that.

Time the run clearing the disk:

    # time dcfldd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=4M
    18944 blocks (75776Mb) written.dcfldd:: No space left of device
    real     16m17.033s
    user     0m0.377s
    sys      0m51.160s

Calculate MB/s by dividing the output of the dcfldd command by the time in seconds. For this example: 75776Mb / (16.4 min * 60) = 77.0 MB/s.

## Data

Note: The community is encouraged to populate the tables in this section.

### /dev/frandom

This article or section is a candidate for merging with Frandom.

Notes: The "Benchmarks" on the frandom page should get incorporated here. The frandom page should stay intact of course. (Discuss in Talk:Benchmarking disk wipes#)

### /dev/zero

Note: As there has been no evident clarification in the article this table was moved from it can only be assumed all wipes were done with `/dev/zero`.

Manufacture | Model | HDD Speed (RPM) | Interface | Capacity (GB) | Time (Hrs) | Throughput (MB/s)
--- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | ---
Hitachi | HTS725016A9A364 | 7200 | SATA2 | 160 | 0.72 | 63
Intel | SSDSA2M080G2GC | SSD | SATA2 | 80 | 0.27 | 77
Samsung | HD322HJ | 7200 | SATA2 | 320 | 1.15 | 74
Seagate | ST31000333AS | 7200 | SATA2 | 1000 | 2.92 | 90
Seagate | ST31500341AS | 7200 | SATA2 | 1500 | 4.13 | 96
Western Digital | WD20EARS | 5900 | SATA2 | 2000 | 5.91 | 94

Categories:

- Security
- Hardware