You could go through and `dd` to every disk before adding it to the pool and that is the common practice used by many. The problem that this is trying to solve is to be able to avoid the delay of having to wait for every disk to be pre-warmed before using it. Also, people often forget to "warm" a disk before adding it to a pool and then find themselves stuck with the performance penalty. This command allows you to "warm" the disk at anytime. It also means that you could "warm" the disk while you immediately start using it. During that time there would be an I/O penalty since you're obviously doing more I/O than just writes but it allows those operations to run concurrently. Furthermore, you could extend this command to implement some form of secure delete where you want to write a pattern over any free space. Or even manually TRIM the data by issuing TRIM commands on any free region of the disk. This functionality has a very specific use case for us at Delphix but we felt that others might be interested in something similar (especially since people today are already using `dd` for this purpose).
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