incremental disk wipe?

[Rashkae]

On 15-03-07 03:39 PM, rikona wrote:
> Again, thanks to all for the helpful suggestions! This might fix the 
> 'problem' - when I tried wiping, OO [and other pgms] would NOT run 
> correctly, or at all, crashing repeatedly. The box was not useable 
> while wiping. How can I get dd [or something else] to run 'nice' as 
> you suggest? Can I set it in htop after it starts, or is it better to 
> start it with the desired nice? One of the pgm complaints seemed to be 
> related to disk access. Does nice also work to control disk access, 
> since this is such a disk-intensive process? Recoll accesses a few 
> large xapian data bases [~90GB], and I use it very often for searches 
> - I need it to work well while wiping. I manually update these Recoll 
> DBs for the same reason - it takes over the box. Would be good to have 
> that be 'nice' too...


If your programs are crashing while you're trying to wipe a drive, you 
have some other problem that needs addressing.  Wiping a drive can 
saturate the IO of an older system, but even if that's the case, you 
should only notice a bit of hesitation here and there, not programs 
crashing and refusing to run.  This sounds more like you are trying to 
wipe a drive that has an active swap partition. Though you might also be 
suffering from a faulty i/o chipset, or bad ram.