Disk Cleanup Tool - Discussion

Yes, it would shorten the life of the drive. Everything has a max write cycle.

The question is how often you would need to use this feature. Obviously, you wouldn't need to use this feature every time you deleted an item.

For mechanical hard disks, the life reduction would be statistically insignificant.

I use it every night prior to turning off the computer, and although I can't say one way or the other that it shortens drive life, it hasn't hurt mine. The average life of a mechanical drive is said to be around five years. This laptop is that old, and despite the use of CCleaner, and File Shredder (XP & below), my drive is still going. File Shredder has a free space scrub function that you can adjust (up to 35 times) to your preference. That really does a great job, mabye they'll come out with a Windows 7 compatible one.

That is just super paranoia to be honest. It is never necessary to overwrite a drive that many times unless one is worried that the NSA or the FBI would get a hold of the drive and use an electron microscope to scan and analyze the platters.

It doesn't overwrite the entire drive, just the files you're deleting. The same principle as an office that shreds most documents prior to disposal. You make internet purchases, get confidential emails, you want these records gone. If by any chance spyware was placed on your computer, these kind of things can be found.

My point is that really all the overwrite that needs to be done is 3 times MAX. I wasn't talking about the entire drive. No one can recover data from online after using the DoD 5220.22-M method. (3 write method).

Why do you think it's called the DoD method? It was developed by the Dept of Defense! That is one of the options in CCleaner.


From Wikipedia:
Data sanitization DoD 5220.22-M is sometimes cited as a standard for sanitization to counter data remanence.

US Department of Defense in the clearing and sanitizing standard DoD 5220.22-M recommends the approach "Overwrite all addressable locations with a character, its complement, then a random character and verify"

You're right, you do have a choice of how many times you overwrite. There's one, three, seven (NASA's standard) and 35 (the Guttman method). That gives you four choices. It's my choice to delete beyond recovery. Then, once monthly, I use another program made by the same company. Recuva is the name of it. It's actually a file undeleter, but you can run it, see what files (if any) are recoverable, and there actually are some. You have the option to recover, or you can overwrite these files with the same options as CCleaner. It takes all night to run, but it gets the leftovers good.

A three (x3) times overwrite is enough for any home computing, apps like DBAN, Eraser etc have more and less but (x3) is good for erasing ... unless your running guns or your a drug lord