Write Zeros Extremely Slow

WD Software WD Software
1

Using an eSATA connection to a StarTech 6gbps dock to do an initial checkout of a SATA III 6gbps 4TB drive.

Running dlgdiag write zeros test. Task Manager (Windows 10 Pro x64) show drive active 90% of the time, ~470 ms response time and ~14Mbytes/sec write speed.

It has been running for 15 hours and has 65 hours left to go.

Does dlgdiag write a sector at a time, a track at a time or a cylinder at a time. IOW, how many sectors are overwritten with each I/O?

2

You are provided with two options when writing zeroes: Quick Erase and Full Erase.

Full Erase will fully wipe out the drive. This takes significantly longer (Many hours) in order to ensure complete data destruction. This process can take 9 hours for 32GB volumes, and is directly affected by hard drive size rather than interface.

600×452 133 KB

365×171 3.79 KB

366×172 3.64 KB

However, if the hard drive in question has bad sectors the process can stall. This is why a health test is recommended before writing zeros.

3

This process can take 9 hours for 32GB volumes

That seems way too long. It implies 270 hours for a 1 TB drive.

Write zeros on the 4 TB drive has been running for well over two days and still has thirteen hours left. There is bug in the GUI. It is only showing a little over thirteen hours elapsed time even through the process has been running for over sixty hours.

It only takes a few hours to copy the contents of one full 4 TB drive to another one. So it should be possible to write zeroes over every sector – including the reserved ones – in a few hours. Apparently the Write Zeros process is doing more than just overwriting every sector on the drive with zeros.

I would like to know what it is doing.