Cleaning a Disk

0Harry • 28th Feb 2010 • Systems Administration • dd, hard drive

To keep a hard drive healthy you should “use” it, by this I mean filling the disk with data and then cleaning up the used space (giving all the sectors activity). The easiest way i know of doing this is by writing zeros to the disk, this should also be done when selling hard drives.

In Linux run:

$ dd if=/dev/zero > tmp.file ; rm tmp.file