Why 'zero' a HDD other than security?

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videobruce

Limp Gawd
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Other then the probably most common reason to 'wipe' a drive of old data, are there any technical reasons to 'zero' a HDD?
 
videobruce said:
Other then the probably most common reason to 'wipe' a drive of old data, are there any technical reasons to 'zero' a HDD?
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If it's got any pending sectors, afirmatively writing to all sectors should clear that up (either the write works and it marks the sector good, or the write fails and the sector gets reallocated). Otherwise, I dunno, probably not really?
 
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Back in the day I ran an "off-brand" Win XP on a P4. Even after doing a full format of my drive I was unable to install Win XP. As a last ditch effort I decided to LLF the drive and the issues were gone. I've had a few weird things over the years, mostly back on the day, and a LLF has erased the issue.
 
funkydmunky said:
Back in the day I ran an "off-brand" Win XP on a P4. Even after doing a full format of my drive I was unable to install Win XP. As a last ditch effort I decided to LLF the drive and the issues were gone. I've had a few weird things over the years, mostly back on the day, and a LLF has erased the issue.
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Probably a permissions issue.
 
I've only ever done a full format, multi pass with different bit patterns, for security after decommissioning old drives of business customers.

Magnetic patterns around the edges of each bit can be used to reconstruct the original data if only a clear wipe is used.
You'd have to be committed and have good kit to do this though, it would only be where there is known sensitive data someone wants access to.
This is why multi pass, multi pattern formatters exist, the edge patterns are largely disrupted preventing reliable data reconstruction.
 
if you have too many 1s next to eachother and an error occurs, they may topple over and the more standing next to eachother will cause a cascading downfall effect.

oh wait, no i am thinking of dominos.
 
No idea if this has been proven or not, but I've seen speculation that for SMR drives that can't be secure erased an alternative method of restoring the original performance may be zero-filling the whole drive. Personally, once I learned from experience just how slow SMR drives can become I started treating them like write-once storage devices, so I never got around to testing if zero-filling could "fix" them.
 
Not quite the same thing, but you might zero the free space if you plan on taking an image of the drive, or transfering an image to a new host.

I wouldn't even bother zeroing the drive for security purposes; it gets the hammer once pulled from production.
 
opieant said:
No idea if this has been proven or not, but I've seen speculation that for SMR drives that can't be secure erased an alternative method of restoring the original performance may be zero-filling the whole drive. Personally, once I learned from experience just how slow SMR drives can become I started treating them like write-once storage devices, so I never got around to testing if zero-filling could "fix" them.
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Zero filling might help the SMRs that aren't host managed... Or it might just fully mess them up. Depends on how smart the firmware is, I guess.
 
have to treat SMR drives like extremely slow SSD, they do understand that Zero byte write can clear a Shingle if they get enough empty blocks for consolidation if you Zero fill a SMR drive it will effectively reset the drive once its been idle for some hours (never fill with random or 1s on a SSD or a SMR drive) most SMR drives support TRIM command (unless its an Older WD red SMR not a nas nas drive lol that lacks TRIM support) so it can do garbage collection later on like an SSD

real ATA secure erase is the best way to erase a SSD or SMR drive
 
I have found that after several years of use, most drives that will be used as boot drives will benefit from a complete wipe/zero etc.....if for no other reason but to do the sector realignment/reclaiming etc as mentioned already, so that windblows won't think that any partitions, sectors or fragments of data that no longer exists etc are somehow still there... but that's just me & my obsessive attention to details :)
 
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