The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/-ReadingBug- on 2024-12-08 22:02:29.

Apologies if this has been asked before but I didn’t find a clear answer.

I’ve just purchased a few manufacturer recertified 20TB drives from ServerPartDeals for unraid/cold storage use for all my important data. External HDDs were my previous choice and my previous verification method was to run smart scans followed by the laborious effort of filling each drive to max capacity to ensure all sectors can be written to. Then I’d reformat and write my real data to the drive.

With manufacturer recertified drives, is the max capacity step still necessary? If so, is there another method or tool that might speed up the process?