Why does deleted data stay on a HDD once written, waiting to be overwritten, as opposed to being removed when requesting deletion?
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It isn’t ‘waiting’. When you delete a file, in reality you are just telling your PC it doesn’t need to store that data’s location in an index anymore. Without the location, your PC can’t ‘see’ the data anymore. All it sees is that there is available space to write to. It doesn’t matter in the slightest if there was data there previously or not. It will take the same amount of time to overwrite discarded data as it would to overwrite all 0s (no data). So instead of taking the time to clear the old data (overwrite old data with all 0s) then write in the new data (which would be writing to the same space twice), it will just overwrite it with new data (only writing once). Your PC doesn’t know when it is overwriting old data, it just writes to available space, whether it was used before or not.
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