[mythtv-users] Western Digital Red for Myth

[Raymond Wagner]

On 8/24/2013 10:29 AM, Doug Lytle wrote:
> I've gotten into the habit of running DBAN on the drives that I've
> purchased.
>
> It takes a couple days to run though a 3TB drive, but I am hoping that
> it will show problems early on, before putting it into production by
> doing so.

There's no reason to waste your CPU generating pseudo-random data. Just 
writing zeros to a couple files has the same effect. Remember, when 
you're writing zeros to disk, you're not actually writing zeros to 
platter. You're writing encoded data to platter. You're never going to 
be able to read back every bit off the platter accurately, so the disk 
uses erasure coding to ensure proper recovery. Just write zeros, and 
then read the file back out to confirm it's zeros.