Does solaris require disks to be zeroed before using

From: David A.Lethe (davidATsantools.com)
Date: 09/23/04 

Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 22:10:22 -0500

This is causing some issues at our company, and we can't get any
definitive answers. Is there any requirement, or even best-practices
policies that SCSI and/or fibre channel disk drives need to have all
zeros written to them before partitioning and building a file system
on them?

The problem is that our disk exercising/test suites finish by leaving
the patterns on the disks. The more experienced sysadmins feel it is
a good idea to zero all blocks on the disk before using them. Others
feel as long as the pattern doesn't look like a partition that could
confuse fdisk, then repartitioning and building the filesystem is
enough. (Remember, disks just passed extended read/write tests, so no
benefit to the disk in terms of defect detection and bad sector
remapping. Also the disks could be physical drives or LUNs on a RAID)

Does anybody know if there will be issues down the road if we don't
write zeros to all blocks as final part of disk test before we start
using them?

I'm posting in Solaris group, but would be interested in knowing if
any O/S's really cared one way or another.

David

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