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FAQ - When is blkdiscard
preferable to dd
?
Detail
In some circumstances it may be necessary to remove all data from an SSD drive used by Aerospike. There are multiple
methods of doing this, two of the most common being dd
and blkdiscard
. Which is better to use in what circumstances?
Answer
The dd
approach will mark all sectors on the SSD as ‘used’ as it writes zeros across the disk. This interferes with the
ability of the SSD to perform sector reallocations, native trim and wear levelling, as all sectors are now deemed occupied.
blkdiscard
on an SSD only marks the sectors as unused so that they are treated as all zeros. For this reason, blkdiscard
is preferred in most cases. However, on AWS instances, blkdiscard
instead performs an OPAL rotation on the data, which
leaves it with garbage data. In this case, dd
is the better option.
Keywords
DD BLKDISCARD ZERO SSD AWS OPAL ROTATION
Timestamp
March 2020