Beacon

It’s not cringy at all

Just because a writer isn’t consciously aware of doing it intentionally doesn’t mean it wasn’t part of the process that happened in their brain

Correct, it was the built it disk utility app on Mac. I had a giant drive with a few partitions and clicked to do a zero pass and it finished in a half second. Obviously there was no way it completed that fast. I did some empirical testing based on completion time and sure enough it only zeroes a single partition rather than the entire disk

I’ve found that on some systems and some utility apps, if there are partitions present then doing a zeroing pass only zeros the partition rather than the entire drive itself

If it’s a spinning disk hard drive then do a low level format i.e. do a security write zeros on the whole disk (be sure to delete all partitions first). This will try to write a zero to every single sector, and any bad sectors will be removed from use.