How long should a surface write test usually take?

[NValtman11]

I have a Samsung HM250HI 250gb drive in which I am currently performing the disk reinitialization process. After nearly 6 hours, the average write speed has fluctuated between .10 mb/s and 1mb/s. The current estimated completion time is 96 hours, which to me seems to be a bit excessive. However, this is the first time I have used this method so I'm not sure if this is to be expected or if I'm having some other sort of trouble. Each sector so far has given me the light green color which should indicate a strong working sector so I can't see why it would be working so slowly. The drive is attached via USB 2.0 Vantec adapter. Any help, advice, or input would be greatly appreciated!

[hdsentinel]

Thanks for your message and question.

Basically, the "Reinitialise disk surface" process is one of the most intensive testing methods. It performs many overwrite passes with special patterns before clearing and verifying the resulting sectors to force the hard disk to repair possible problems.

Usually if there is a such fluctuation, then
- the affected surface area of the hard disk may have problems (in this case the blocks may turn yellow / red)
- there are power requirement problems, especially on 2.5" hard disks connected on USB channel
(see http://www.hdsentinel.com/hard_disk_case_spin_retry.php - this problem may be also related to the same problem)
- general overheating of the USB adapter / enclosure which prevents the data transfer on the highest possible speed

The USB connection limits the performance of the hard disk to approx. 40-50% of the possible speed.
In the current situation (using USB 2.0 connection) the "Reinitialise disk surface" test should work at approx. 6 MByte/sec, so on your hard disk it may take 250000 / 6 = 41667 seconds = 11 hours 34 minutes (if there are no big problems found with the hard disk, which may increase this).

[nimbystripes]

If you have a 3.0 USB port available with external HD like Seagate GoFlex, this will be much faster.