Erase The Contents of Free Space?

joe2cool

Hi erasing the contents of 'free space on your hard drive' as well as giving you extra GB, security of erased documents etc, will it actually improve the performance of a PC? Also how often is it safe to do this?

Thx

tronator

joe2cool wrote: »

Hi erasing the contents of 'free space on your hard drive' as well as giving you extra GB, security of erased documents etc, will it actually improve the performance of a PC? Also how often is it safe to do this?

Thx

It doesn't give you extra GB and therefore will not improve the performance.

joe2cool

Really..... so only useful for security of erasing documents etc

jayme1

yes it is good to do if you have never done it before, it can slightly improve performance of the hard drive but you wont notice it.

I would say depending on how large your hard drive is I wouldnt do it very often as 1. it will take a lot of time and 2. drive eraseure is very intensive on the drive as it physically has to work a lot to erase the drive.

so after you have erased the empty space once then in future do a secure erase of files you want to delete, there are freeware available and kaspersky pure and some other antivirus has it built in. it will end up the same effect as doing a fill erase frequently but without the physical wear on the drive.

joe2cool

large hard drive...... just wondered about performance thx for comments

rygon

I thought that all erasing the free space did was place random 1s and 0s around it, which helps mask the deleted files?

JJ_Egan

A defrag will improve performance a erase free space can not as its free space .
Why erase free space unless you want to hide some data . Its happened before that users have mixed up erase free space with erase drive .

jje

esuhl

"Erasing free space" (i.e. overwriting the unused part of a hard drive) will not "give you extra GB" or improve performance.

It can reduce the liklihood that someone will be able to recover deleted files from the drive. The only benefit of this is if you are selling/donating the drive to a third-party, or if you are concerned about the drive being physically stolen.

Overwriting every bit on a drive that isn't being used to store a datum is an intensive process - so it will take time and is likely to increase the wear of your drive (reducing its lifespan).

closed

Won't make any difference to performance whatsoever, and defrag probably won't make any noticeable difference either.

S0litaire

Security wise, it's best to do a full defrag of the drive then a wipe of all free space.
it will not do much for speed though...