[Discuss] Failing WD Disks

[richard.pieri at gmail.com (Rich Pieri)]

On Thu, 18 May 2023 09:35:14 -0700
Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> wrote:

> Lessons:
> 
> - Spinning media can have problems.

ALL media can have problems. SSDs happen to have different kinds of
problems with different kinds of failure modes.

> - Portable 5TB WD drives are maybe too bleeding edge.

This is more a limitation of USB throughput than anything else.

> - Even if it seems to take forever, next time I set up one of these 
> disks I am going to first dd it full of random data. It will be a
> test of the disk, and makes the encrypted disk more secure.

Maybe less so than you might think due to how logical block addressing
(LBA) works. Realistically, setting up ZFS with native encryption is
sufficient for most consumer and enterprise use cases, and then write a
file full of zeroes in the encrypted dataset if you want to fill up the
disk blocks.

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