Re: Does solaris require disks to be zeroed before using

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Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 03:31:33 GMT

David A.Lethe wrote:
> 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
>
FWIW, I've moved used disks from other brands of system (e.g. Dell,
HP) to Suns without ever worrying about what was on them, and have
never experienced a problem as a result.

The only problem I can imagine is if a disk were low level formatted
with an odd sector size (as are some IBM disks), it might need to be
low level formatted again with a suitable sector size.

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