[X4U] New Drive: Simple reformat enough?

[Zane H. Healy]

At 3:23 AM -0800 12/16/08, Randy B. Singer wrote:
>On Dec 15, 2008, at 5:58 PM, zapcat wrote:
>
>>I just got a couple of new external Drives, which come formatted 
>>for PC. before I use them, I will reformat them for Mac of course, 
>>but is the simple reformatting good enough, or do I need to write 
>>Zeros to these discs first?
>
>No, you do not need to write zeros to the drive.  Previously folks 
>did this to map out bad blocks on the drive, but with modern drives 
>you don't need to do this manually because it is accomplished 
>automatically on the fly.
>
>However, you do need to do a bit more than simply reformat your new 
>drive.  In the Bombich Forums is an excellent post on how to 
>properly prepare your external HD before you use it:
>http://forums.bombich.com/viewtopic.php?t=4084

I have to disagree here.  The day 10.4 came out I bought a new HD for 
my system disk, it had a defective spot on it.  If I'd zeroed out the 
drive I'd have found the bad spot prior to using it for two months. 
Once I filled up the drive to the point that I hit the bad spot the 
system freaked.  That is the main time I've lost data due to a HD 
failure in over 20 years.

I view zeroing the drive out as a good test of the HD.  It doesn't 
hurt anything, the downside is that it does take a long time with the 
big drives we have now.

Zane


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