[ale] How do I fill a new hard drive with random data to burn it in?

[Derek Atkins]

Phil Turmel <philip at turmel.org> writes:

> On 12/30/2012 10:48 PM, Ron Frazier (ALE) wrote:
>> Hi Phil,
>> 
>> Thanks for the note.  I was trying something very similar, except for the bs=1M.  It appeared to be working ok, but was very slow.  I haven't had a chance to try shred.  I think I've found a better tactic below.
>
> The "bs=1M" is there for speed.  Without it, dd reads/writes individual
> 256 byte sectors.  With such short requests, the OS can't max out the link.
>
> For just a random wipe, dd or shred are simplest.  You want verification
> of successful writes, so I concur with your choice of badblocks.

Indeed, I always run a "badblocks -w" on my devices before I put them
into production.  This will do a write/read-verify on every bit of every
sector of the drive, making sure you can switch every bit from 0->1 and
1->0.  It does not write random data.  At the end of the run you should
have a device with all 0s.

> Phil

-derek
-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
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