The need for initialising disks before use?

[Antony Mawer]

Hi list,

A quick question - is it recommended to initialise disks before using 
them to allow the disks to map out any "bad spots" early on? I've seen 
some "uninitialised" disks (ie. new disks, thrown into a machine, 
newfs'd) start to show read errors within a few months of deployment, 
which I thought one or two might seem okay, but on a number of machines 
is more than a coincidence...

Is it recommended/required to do something like:

     dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 bs=1m

before use to ensure the drive's sector remappings are all in place, 
before then doing a newfs?

FWIW, I've been seeing this on more 6.0 systems that I would have 
thought to be just chance...

Cheers
Antony