Destructive Windows Script

[Peter Hansen]

rbt wrote:
> Chris Lambacher wrote:
> 
>> The reason they are slow and tedious is that they need to write to
>> every byte on the disk.  Depending on the size of the disk, there may
>> be a lot of data that needs to be written, and if they are older
>> computers, write speed may not be particularly fast.
> 
> 
> OK, I accept that, but if you have a HDD that's 8GB total and it has 1GB 
> of files, why must every byte be written to? Why not just overwrite the 
> used portion?

What do you think is in the "unused" space, given that much of it likely 
had files at some time in the past, maybe even older copies of some of 
the files that are currently "live"?  If you haven't wiped all those 
files previously, their data is still quite accessible.

-Peter