Proper preparation of 3tb hard disk for storage (advice wanted)

[hippovsmouse]

Hey folks, well I have bought 2 refurbished 3tb hard drives. They came from a reputable company, properly sealed and properly formatted. I read somewhere a few days ago that there are benefits to writing zeros to a hard drive (beyond those of previous data destruction) before beginning to use the disk. Would you here agree that there are benefits to writing zeros to the drive before use?

I just finished zeroing the first drive - it took 30 hours. If there is no benefit to it, then I'll skip it with the second drive and save another 30 hours - but if there is some benefit to it then i'm willing to invest the time.

Thoughts?
Thanks

 

[CiPHER]

Would you here agree that there are benefits to writing zeros to the drive before use?

No. The retention could be worse; but retention of unused sectors is irrelevant. It only starts to matter when you store data and then they will be written to by definition. So zero-writing in advance is utterly pointless IMO.

I just finished zeroing the first drive - it took 30 hours.

Then you are doing it wrong. Sequential write on a 3TB drive should take about 3,5 hours or so. It may be much slower if using USB2 external interface, but 30 hours is crazy. Maybe you using some utility that writes using 512 byte request size. Stop that silly practice!

 

[zir_blazer]

For reference, using SeaTools for DOS to zero fill my Seagate 4 TB 7200.15, took like 12-15 hours or so.
The idea of zero filling besides erasing previous data, is to check the entire usable space for possible errors, before you write actual data to them.

 

[hippovsmouse]

I went ahead and just did a quick format on the 2nd drive, they're both bitlockering now (which looks like it'll take 24 hours).

The laptop I have the drives plugged into is from 2010 or 11, it may be usb 2.0 I dunno, it's just an old slave laptop anyway, slow is ok so long as it gets the job done.

I guess I do need to do a disk check on that second drive after it encrypts (the first also?)

Any other advice for the drives' prep are welcome - one will be for main use, the second is to back up that main one. I'm hoping to avoid a repeat incident of what happened with my drive about a year ago: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2393593&highlight=

Speaking of that link, I still have that 3tb drive untouched from when it gave me that problem a year ago, I don't think I'll ever format it :\
So if anyone has any advice on that old problem

 

[Coup27]

Some people write zeros to a brand new drive simply to stress test it to ensure it's not DOA or going to die very prematurely. I don't do it as I think it's a bit of a waste of time.

If these are refurbs directly from the manufacturer then the likelihood on them being DOA is probably less than a brand new drive.

 

[ArisVer]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sector_slipping

During a low-level format, defect lists are populated which store which sectors are bad. The bad sectors are then mapped and a sector slipping algorithm is utilized. When using sector slipping for bad sectors, disk access time is not largely affected. The drive will just skip over the sectors and takes the same time as it would have to read the sector. Spare sectors are located on the disk to aid in having sectors to “slip” other sectors down to, allowing for the preservation of sequential ordering of the data. Accuracy of programs reliant on static knowledge of cylinders and block positions will be compromised though.

Bad sectors that are found during normal usage of the disk are not capable of having the sector slipping algorithm applied. Instead a linear reallocation, or sector forwarding, is used where a bad sector is replaced with a sector from a spare area. Doing this does affect access times as the disk will need to seek to the spare sector since all further lookups of the bad sector will redirect to the new sector.