Take the 2-minute tour ×  My Google-fu has been useless here,
and my knowledge of low-level storage details is terrible.  Does
a brand-new, right-off-the-shelf hard drive contain all random
noise, or do they come with all zeroed-out bits? I've wondered
for a while but it's mostly been a question to consider in
passing. This may be a manufacturer-specific detail, however.
For context, I was considering whether or not an encrypted
section of a disk would be identifiable by an adversary. Secure
ciphers are (conjectured to be) indistinguishable from random
noise, and so if new drives were all random noise, an adversary
would be unable to identify an encrypted section. If new drives
are all zero bits, however, it would be precisely the opposite.
share|improve this question If you are worried format the drive
yourself. There are tools that would make any default setting
pointless to have. The answer to your question of course, since
it has no filesystem, it really doesn't matter whats on the hdd
because there isn