Wiping hard drives before first use?

[Synomenon]

Just curious. Does anyone else here wipe new hard drives with utilities like DBAN before their first use?

I've been doing this all the time. Each time I buy a new hard drive, the first thing I do after installing it is wiping it with DBAN. I think I do this now because of the stories I've read of hard drives shipping with viruses.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Any new hard drive I've received came unformatted, so there was no data on the drive to be recognized by the OS. No data, no virus.

 

[Hidden Hippo]

I've always had to format a new drive before I can actually use it so there can't be viruses on there.

 

[TheKub]

Nope, I might consider doing it if I picked up used\refurbed drive, but I don't ever see myself doing that.

 

[corkyg]

A new drive comes "unallocated." It is not even formatted. My first action is to clone that drive from one to be replaced using Acronis TI - that destroys any existing partition and puts in a new one.

Then, if the old drive is to be recycled elsewhere, I will wipe the drive.

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: corkyg
A new drive comes "unallocated." It is not even formatted.

That is not always true. External HDDs tend to ship formatted, plus my oddball Seagate internal 650GB EIDE drives were formatted out of the sealed retail box. However, I have not heard of another internal drive being formatted from the factory (from a sealed box/antistatic bag).

As for wiping new HDDs before formatting/installing... nope. No reason to. Even if it is an external drive, just format it. Even a quick format will usually kill off a computer virus, unless it's a boot sector virus. For those, BITD I used to use the "fdisk /mbr" command, which effectively killed boot sector viruses. Don't know what the modern equivalent would be.