Accelerate Full Wipe

[Paladin1]

Hi All;

Forgive me if this question is redundant.

I volunteer with a not for profit and we receive donated desktops and laptops. For all machines we do a Full wipe of each drive and then deploy a standard image.

We have a small isolated FOG environment with one FOG server (1.5.9) and a couple of desktops plugged into a switch. Everything is working fine except with the growth in SATA drive size e.g. 2TB the Full wipe can take hours; if not days.

How can I make the Full Wipe faster?

• list item Would a faster switch and faster NICs in the machines help?

• list item Would using SATA3 motherboards on the server and targets help?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[george1421]

@Paladin1 First the wipe speed is controlled by the wipe method + target hard drive + processor speed of the target computer. The FOG server and/or network has no impact on the speed it takes to wipe a hard drive.

You really can’t do much about improving the wipe speed with the hardware. The hardware you have is all you have. The wipe method is a sliding scale between efficiency and security. A one pass data wipe will be of course faster than 3 to 7 pass DoD mandated wipe (be aware this DoD wipe is only really effective for HDD, SSDs are good with just a single pass wipe.

So using the FOG utility to fast wipe a hard drive uses a single pass wipe method. The full wipe method uses a 3 pass wipe (i.e. writes to every block on the drive 3 times).

You can use an alternative disk wiping tool like dban and have fog send that tool to the target computer via PXE booting if the standard FOG wipe command is not what you are looking for.

Lastly you need to be aware of technical limitations of the media you have. For spinning disk I’ve typically seen on average for a single disk a maximum speed of 90MB/s (I have seen as high as 120MB/s for certain drives) If you were going to use a single pass wipe on a 2TB hard drive it would take 7 hours-7 minutes-11 seconds to write to every block on that drive.

For SATA SSD drives I’ve seen on average 500MB/s for that same 2TB ssd drive it would take 1 hour-16 minutes-53 seconds

And to round out the numbers for NVMe drives on average write speeds of 1500MB/s it would take about 26 minutes for a single pass wipe

ref: https://techinternets.com/copy_calc

[Paladin1]

@george1421 thanks George! I guess I am going to have to get a more powerful target. Maybe 12th gen rather than 3rd Gen?
Not 13th or 14th gen as they have stability issues.

[Paladin1]

@george1421 post can be marked as solved.

Do I do that or is this done by a Moderator?