Erase options 1 pass, 3 pass, etc speed?

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Hi everyone, I want to completely erase my hard drive and reinstall Lion. I'm a bit confused about the 1 pass, 3 pass, or the 7 pass? i would like to know the speed each one would take.

My specs:
Macbook pro 17"
Core i7 2.66Ghz
8gb ram
512gb solid state drive

when i went online, someone had a 1tb 5400rpm and did the 1 pass which took 3.5 hours, so with mine at half the space and a solid state drive, maybe about 1 hour each pass?

Thank you

Stefan
 

pigoo3

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Hi everyone, I want to completely erase my hard drive and reinstall Lion. I'm a bit confused about the 1 pass, 3 pass, or the 7 pass? i would like to know the speed each one would take.

My first question back at you is...do you understand what is going on by using this feature?:)

The whole "pass" method is basically a security feature where the entire hard drive is overwritten with 1's and 0's so that any info on the hard drive is not readable or recoverable. This is a great thing to do before selling or otherwise disposing of a computer to insure personal security.

But...if all you're going to be doing is reinstalling Lion (and keeping the computer)...there really is no benefit to doing this. All you really have to do is boot from your bootable Lion disk, open disk utility, and use Disk Utility's "Erase" feature.

In fact you don't even need to use Disk Utility's "Erase" feature...to make things even easier (the way Apple has thing's designed in the first place)...is just do a "new" or "clean" install of Lion.

There really is no need to do the "secure erase" (1-pass, 3-pass, or 7-pass) if you're keeping the computer in your possession.:)

HTH,

- Nick
 
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If you constantly Secure Delete your Trash, there is no reason to do the 1-pass, 3-pass, or 7-pass secure erase for your HD.

I've read that people gain back 1-2GB if you do the 7-pass secure erase but it takes aloooooooooooooooooooooooooong time to complete depending the sizze of your HD and files on it. I secure delete everything in Trash and tried the 7-pass. It took 2 hours and I gained 12MB back from doing it. :Confused:
 
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Godd advice there, secure empty trash is a good way of freeing space, but no need for the 7 pass thing, unless you sell. It takes forever anyway.
 
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Thanks everyone! you all have been so helpful! So all I need to do is insert my Lion DVD, reboot while holding "c" then go to "Reinstall OSX Lion" or "disk utility" to erase then go to "Reinstall Lion"?

Thanks again! (first time doing a reinstallation for a mac)

Stefan
 
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So all I need to do is insert my Lion DVD, reboot while holding "c" then go to "Reinstall OSX Lion" or "disk utility" to erase then go to "Reinstall Lion"?

That.

Or hold down Command + R which will take you to the Lion Recovery Partition and then Disk Utility and reinstall.

Cheers
 
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just a status report, I erased everything and I'm back up and running! thanks again everyone. another question would be what do you guys use to uninstall/delete files/programs? just drag to the trash and "secure delete"? or use an app such as TrashMe or AppCleaner etc?

Thanks!
 
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I use AppZapper, which is free, and does the job admirably, putting all associated program files in the trash. I then just empty as normal.
 
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Well, I've seen other posts saying that these app clean out programs sometimes miss things. Maybe most, but not all - at least not all the time.
 

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