Is one harder on the device physically than the other?
Nowadays many drives internally encrypt data, so all zeros (or all ones) are stored internally as "mixed" values anyway. Therefore it shouldn't matter. In case of flash memory (like SSD) use TRIM to "fully erase it for further use" (zero-filling or one-filling is not equivalent to TRIM).
are there any other possible considerations?
I'm a Linux user. From my point of view zeros are extremely easy to get because there is /dev/zero
in the OS. Getting all ones is not that easy. It's the only reason to prefer zeros I can think of. And since the easiest way to fill a drive with anything is to use dd
, cat
or cp
(rather than writing your own program), filling with zeros from /dev/zero
seems natural.
Zero-filling is easy:
cp /dev/zero /dev/sdX
while one-filling requires some additional work:
</dev/zero tr '\0' '\377' >/dev/sdX
Note the latter can be used to fill the device with any fixed byte value. In this sense all ones are as "hard" to get as any other byte except all zeros.