On Mon, 2018-08-13 at 11:00 +0200, Julien Cristau wrote:
> A previous iteration on this was
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=722898
A modern SSD can write hundreds of megabytes per second, and contains on
the order of a terabyte. Older SSDs are smaller, but slower. Rotating disks
are much slower, but typically also many times larger.
write speed disk size wipe time note
(MiB/s) (TiB) (h)
20 1 15 older laptop HD
200 0.25 0.7 older laptop SSD
500 1 0.6 new laptop SSD
40 1 7 older desktop HD
200 1 1.5 desktop SSD
These are calculated times. Real times are likely longer, since wipe speeds
tend to be below what the hardware actually achieves.
Most people do not need to wipe their disks at installation time, when
using full-disk encryption. It would be enough to do that when the system
is booted, and can be used, in the background, at a priority that does not
hurt normal use.
Those that do need it should opt into wiping. As a user experience, having
to opt out of something you don't need is not great. Worse, the installer
it not a good place to explain the things one needs to make an informed
decision.
Having the installation process effectively pause even for half an hour is
bad. And half an hour is a best-case scenario that only applies to those
with high-end hardware.
Could we make "wipe disks" into an option in the partitioner, rather than
having people cancel what might be a crucially important thing? And default
that to "no wiping"?
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