What does SDelete do after it reached 100%?

Question

About 2 hours ago, SDelete (sdelete -z) reached 100% - at least that's what it says:

But since then, the disk is >90% busy and the average response time is very high. Write speed is at ~ 7 MB/s. I believe it was at 27 MB/s when SDelete started.

Answer 1

It is flushing the cache - either its own one or the one of the operating system.

The figure "100%" probably appears when all write commands have been successfully issued. Especially when the application is about secure deleting, the 100% should appear after total completion.

Answer 2

The main reason why it is so slow is because you're using the old version 2.0 of SDelete. Version 2.04 is much faster.

For version 2.0: using ProcessMonitor, you can see that it's still writing.

The file size that Process Monitor reports corresponds to the used disk space (if the disk was empty).

The drop in throughput is explained by the constant rotation speed of the disk. The disk is written from the outside (where you have a long circumference) to the inside (where you have a short circumference).

So, just wait until the program exits and don't look at the percentages it reports.

Answer 3

According to its MicroSoft documentation, sdelete has two options: to clean the disk, and to zero out the disk. The option to zero out the disk (which is what you chose via the -z flag) does a clean first, and then it zeroes out what it has cleaned. Unfortunately, only the cleaning has a progress bar.

So when the Clean progress has reached 100%, since the command you used is -z, after that the zeroing out phase begins. If you wish to see the progress of the zeroing-out phase of the command, you have to use Thomas Weller's suggestion of running the SysInternals's ProcMon command, and it will tell you which cluster it's working on right now.

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_{(This answer is not my own. It is was written by Alex, who due to a bug is unable to post it here and who gave permission for me to post it.)}