On 17. aug. 2006, at 15.35, Antony Mawer wrote:
Hi list,
A quick question - is it recommended to initialise disks before
using them to allow the disks to map out any "bad spots" early on?
I've seen some "uninitialised" disks (ie. new disks, thrown into a
machine, newfs'd) start to show read errors within a few months of
deployment, which I thought one or two might seem okay, but on a
number of machines is more than a coincidence...
Is it recommended/required to do something like:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 bs=1m
before use to ensure the drive's sector remappings are all in
place, before then doing a newfs?
FWIW, I've been seeing this on more 6.0 systems that I would have
thought to be just chance...
I think the change is that more systems use cheaper SATA drives now.
On several occations I have been unable to build a RAID (hardware or
software based) on brand new disks due to one of the drives "failing"
during initialization.
After zeroing all the drives with dd, everything works fine.
I'm not sure if vendors cut corners on initially formatting their
drives to save some $$ or if SATA just lacks some features over SCSI
that causes trouble like this.
--
Frode Nordahl
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