Smaller, more frequent space wipes?

... Are smaller, more frequent free space wipes as good over time as a single multiple series of passes?

Say instead of three pseudorandom data wipes all at once, I do one pseudorandom free space wipes each night for three nights.

Isn't the effect the same, providing no additional data gets written in the interim?

It would seem so to me.

 

Your system writes to the disk almost all the time, logs, temp files, cache, history, etc. Assuming that you're using a good utility like Eraser, the number of wipes only affects how hard it would be to recover with forensic methods. One pass is sufficient against conventional undelete and disk investigation tools. A better method is to use the scheduler and on-demand tools to overwrite the specific data and stop using "delete". The scheduler can overwrite specific files and folders on a regular basis. The launcher component can be used for on-demand overwriting of specific locations, like a browser cache.
Rick