Why does deleted data stay on a HDD once written, waiting to be overwritten, as opposed to being removed when requesting deletion?

Question

Why does deleted data stay on a HDD once written, waiting to be overwritten, as opposed to being removed when requesting deletion?

In: 22

Answer 1

Overwriting files can take a lot of time, especially if the data to be overwritten is very large or spread out in many small pieces.

As such, it’s far faster just to erase a file table entry pointing to that data and move on.