[muks]

I've been a Hetzner customer for several years. I'm yet to have a faulty disk experience with them, but that's not what this post is about.

This month I "purchased" another EX41 server. Something made me wonder if the hard disks on the machine allocated to me were old ones previously used for some other customer, so the first thing I did after installing Linux was to look at smartctl output. Not only were the disks new (power on hours) but as part of provisioning the machine, they seem to have performed a "long" self-test on the disk (see smartctl -t in its manpage). I was impressed by this, because they seem to have checked that I didn't get bad disks on arrival. This is probably expected of such a service provider.. but I've seen worse.

[zifnab06]

They wipe smart before giving you drives. Ovh does the same. Most drives have a serial interface you can connect to with a special cable to do it.

[_wmd]

Any reference for that? Didn't know it was possible. Is it just to minimize customer complaints about otherwise good-enough hardware?