如果你要重新格式化一個硬碟，有沒有什麼可以“提高”以後的寫效能，或者是你甚至不應該擔心的事情？今天的超級使用者問答帖子回答了一位好奇的讀者的問題。

今天的問答環節是由SuperUser提供的，SuperUser是Stack Exchange的一個分支，是一個由社群驅動的問答網站分組。

照片由克里斯·班尼斯特（Flickr）提供。

問題

超級使用者讀者Brettetete想知道用零填充硬碟是否會提高寫入效能：

I have a 2TB hard-drive that was 99 percent full. I have deleted the partiti*** with fdisk and formatted it as ext4. As far as I know, the actual data that was on the hard-drive still exists, yet the partition table was reassigned.

My question is: Would it improve the write performance for further write acti*** if the hard-drive was clean? By ‘clean’ I mean fill the hard-drive with zeroes? Something like:

• dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=1 count=4503599627370496

用零填充硬碟會提高寫效能嗎？

答案

超級使用者貢獻者Michael Kjörling為我們提供了答案：

No, it would not improve performance. HDDs do not work like that.

First, when you write any given data to a rotational drive, it gets transformed into magnetic domains that may actually look very different from the bit pattern you are writing. This is done in part because it is much easier to maintain synchronization when the pattern read back from the platter has a certain amount of variability. For example, a long string of ‘zero’ or ‘one’ values would make it very hard to maintain synchronization. Have you read 26,393 bits or 26,394 bits? How do you recognize the boundary between bits?

The techniques for doing this have evolved over time. For example, look up Modified Frequency Modulation, MMFM, Group Code Recording, and the more general technology of run-length limited encodings.

Second, when you write new data to a sector, the magnetic domains of the relevant porti*** of the platter are simply set to the desired value. This is done regardless of what the previous magnetic domain ‘was’ at that particular physical location. The platter is already spinning under the write head; first reading the current value, then writing the new value if and only if it is different. It would cause each write to require two revoluti*** (or an extra head for each platter), causing write latency to double or greatly increasing the complexity of the drive, in turn increasing cost.

Since the limiting factor in hard-drive sequential I/O performance is how quickly each bit passes under the read/write head, this would not even offer any benefit to the user. As an aside, the limiting factor in random I/O performance is how fast the read/write head can be positioned at the desired cylinder and then the desired sector arrives under the head. The major reason why SSDs can be so fast in random I/O workloads is that they completely eliminate both of these factors.

As pointed out by JakeGould, one reason why you might want to overwrite the drive with some fixed pattern (such as all zeroes) would be to ensure that no remnants of previously stored data can be recovered, either deliberately or accidentally. But doing so will not have any effect on the hard-drive’s performance going forward, for the reas*** stated above.

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