Formatting External Mac Hard Drive

[littlepetewrigley]

Is it absolutely necessary to zero one's external hard drive free space?

I d/l Super Duper and it said that I should do this in order to "test the drive surface, remap any bad or weak spots, and helps to ensure your first backup will be a successful one."

I'm using a brand new 1 TB HD (reformatted to Mac OS) therefore there is no data on there.

Disk Utility states that one should erase free space in order to prevent recovery of deleted files, yet, there are none.

The drive has been deleting for over 12 hours now, mind you, I'm only writing over data once (not 7 or 35 times).

Can someone PLEASE let me know if this is recommended procedure or should I just stop erasing the deletion of free space and proceed to backup my data?

 

[littlepetewrigley]

Anyone???

 

[donpoppa]

what are you trying to hide?

 

[stick]

I'm not familiar with that program, but if it's a new hard drive I'd imagine all of those steps are unneeded.

 

[littlepetewrigley]

@ donpoppa: Lol, I'm not trying to hide anything. Like I said, the external is brand new so there is no data written on it.

It's just that the backup program, SuperDuper!, states to perform this process for reasons stated in my initial post.

@ Nickthestick91: That's what I think/thought as well, but, again, SuperDuper!, recommends this.


Thank you both for your input.

Anyone else?

 

[flipnkraut]

Take a magnet to it.

 

[DPancakes]

Unnecessary.

Only necessary when you have used your external hdd to store data in the past.

edit-

On the other hand, why not just use Time Machine?