I finally gathered enough info and files to put ye olde flakey HDD out of its misery. Burned Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) onto a newly bought 32GB USB stick (as recommended), figured out the booting-from-stick, and DBAN is merrily destructing away at 94MB/s. For 3 passes overwriting a 640GB HDD, this should take 3×1.9 hours = 5.7 hours. Unfortunately, the speed has steadily dropped from 95 to 83MB/s over 50 minutes, and DBAN predicts the time remaining as 9.5 hours (10 hours total).
The only thing I’d do differently next time is to put the flakey HDD into the laptop instead of writing to it over an eSATA cable connecting to an external drive housing. The HDD is supposed to support a SATA speed of 3Gb/s=375MB/s (4x faster than the 94MB/s above). Of course, putting the HDD into the laptop only generates 4x speed if the laptop internally connects to the HDD in a way that supports the full SATA speed. I’ve been searching Toshiba Satellite A660 PSAW3C-047017, but the machine is probably too old. My geek-fu is not good enough to determine this detail.
Is it best practice to put the HDD to destroy into the laptop before running DBAN?
As a related but tangential question, why does the speed slow down steadily? DBAN’s estimated time remaining has steadily increased from 9.5h to 9:51 even though the elapsed time has increased from 27 to 51 minutes.
