Started with 50 MBps, went down to 20 MBps shortly after and is declining slowly since. Running for 7+ hours.
HDD is 5 years old, rare use but very well kept.

Edit: external 1.5 TB HDD connected over USB 3. Overwriting with zeroes while formatting using gnome-disks.

Update:

Stopped gnome-disks ~78% and continued writing zeros using dd for the remaining sectors.
command used: #sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 bs=1M seek=1001250 status=progress (don’t copy without understanding), used seek here to skip already zeroed sectors.
write speed went up from ~14 MB/s to ~100 MB/s.

slow speed could be caused by multiple passes of overwrites by gnome-disks (not sure if it does that), or by “initializing the filesystem at the same time as zeroing” as mentioned by @ares35.

gradual speed decrement was observed in both methods, as mentioned by @Synthead.

Thanks to everyone for being so helpful.

    • @witchergeraltofriviaOP
      12•1 year ago

      Yup I am zeroing it.

      That explains the declining speed. Thanks a lot for the insight!

  • Eager Eagle
    26•1 year ago

    Formatting is almost instantaneous, this seems to be overwriting the files for a safe deletion (a.k.a. deleting white space). In any case, it’s weird to measure a safe deletion speed as MB/s, as the operation involves multiple overwrites. I’d just format it using gparted if you don’t care about deleting the white space.

    • @witchergeraltofriviaOP
      4•1 year ago

      Yes I am overwriting it with zeroes while formatting (using gnome-disks). I didn’t know it did multiple overwrites, thought it did 1 pass overwrite with zeros.

      • Eager Eagle
        9•1 year ago

        It depends, it might be doing a single pass, but doing several is quite common.

        • Max-P
          3•1 year ago

          Probably selected secure erase or something which would write a bunch of random and then zero it out.

          Super common in the enterprise world, probably overkill for OP.

  • @[email protected]
    11•1 year ago

    That is very slow, unless the drive is connected over USB or failing or something, a drive of that capacity should easily be able to handle sequential writes much faster than that. How is the drive connected, and is it SMR?

      • Atemu
        15•1 year ago

        If it’s SMR garbage, this looks normal.

        • @[email protected]
          4•1 year ago

          correct me if I’m wrong but just overwriting the whole disk it wouldn’t make a difference if it is SMR. SMR is only slower if you want to overwrite something kn the middle of it because it then needs to change and re write adjacent tracks.

          • Atemu
            3•1 year ago

            I don’t know what the firmware is doing here (it’s device-managed SMR) but the write speed penalty also occurs for sequential writes in all DM-SMR drives I’ve seen measured.

  • ares35
    9•1 year ago

    initializing the filesystem at the same time as zeroing the drive is probably freaking the smr out and causing it to constantly rewrite tracks.

    i would have separated the two operations. a sector-by-sector wipe via software which would run at the full sequential write speed the drive internals and interface supports (connecting internally would be faster), then partition and format the filesystem. being smr shouldn’t matter here when you’re writing sequentially, start-to-end.

    alternatively for the wipe, use secure_erase (some usb don’t support it though), handled internally by the drive so it runs as fast as it can. still takes awhile with hdd, but can be faster than doing it via software and being limited by the interface speed.

    • @witchergeraltofriviaOP
      4•1 year ago

      Stopped gnome-disks format at 78% (~6 hours remaining).
      Used #sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 bs=1M seek=1001250 status=progress, write speed is ~100 MB/s.
      Thanks a ton!

    • @mvirts
      4•1 year ago

      I’m not sure why this page has an obsolete warning and at this point I’m too afraid to ask 😅