Pros and Cons of zeroing a new hard drive.

I was estimating a full 6-8 hrs which is why I said over night.

And Disk Warrior only reads the SMART status, so yes, instant.
Did you look in Console - System log to see what it wrote there?
That will tell how many spare blocks it shipped with.

Only TechTool Pro does a full scan (media scan).

Even Disk Utility on the bottom of the screen will say "SMART status" but that is almost worthless (pass/fail). Google - those folks with 10's of thousands of hard drives and needing to know the turnover rate, did an indepth study of drive reliability, prediction, how to know. And they claim that when a drive starts to show reduction in the spare blocks is when the drive is failing.

Windows really has better tools, or WD does and only comes in Windows version, for testing and repairing the surface.

By partitioning a drive first into four segments, then each segment can be zeroed, and the segment, about 230GB each, should take an hour or maybe less.

The same things happens when trying to test 8GB or more of memory with Memtest, how long, how many read/write cycles to run.

When you open the Console it will usually automatically open system.log on its own, or you can open it. And newest is at the bottom.

Any time you have Disk Warrior open, just go to the Diagnostic tab and click on manual. That writes to the log again.

1TB (1000GB, not 1024) has fomatted capactity of 933GB. Then plan for allowing 10-15% free space as "overhead" for Mac HFS+ and that it doesn't deal well when free space gets below 10%. Nor does Windows but it alerts and has ability to maintain a quota system.

A drive will change and improve some 3% during the first week depending on use.

Drives like use, what they don't like is variation in temperature, going from A to B and back to A over and over causes fatigue and wear and can cause tracks to 'move' slightly. Expansion and contraction. And lastly, vibration.

A drive that takes too long to zero is an indication of problems or just buggy firmware.

Seems odd that Disk Utility can't do a "chkdsk" and doesn't have the option of its own to try to map out bad sectors. Or tell it to run the command "diskutil" on its own in Single User Mode on next startup. You have to boot from another drive or manually run the command.
Or, that OS X really demands and needs 3rd party disk repair utility to begin with. Meaning, there seems to be some weaknesses in Mac HFS+ stability and integrity?

Hi Kappy. Can I ask, what is the reason you suggest applying a single partition via DU first rather than just going straight to zeroing the drive itself?? Is there something to gain from doing this. Perhaps it has something to do with the "GUID" partition scheme?

Or if anyone else can answer this please feel free!

Adding to this, isn't GUID only if you want it to be bootable? You don't need to do that for just a backup FW drive, right?

tx,

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...Correct.

Also I've come to the conclusion that the partitioning thing I had in question was simply old practice on early versions of Leopard.