New external harddrive and 106Mb unallocated - why

[Robert Moskowitz]

It was pointed out to me, off list, that I am generally targeting a 
country (China) for bad behaviour in this email.  I apologize to people 
this affends.  I have many colleagues in the IETF and IEEE from China 
and work closely with them.  I am applying for a visa to attend the IEEE 
802 meeting there in March, and have been asked to speak at a conference 
in June.  I check out all devices I get to see if malicious code is 
present.  Since most is targeted for MS OSs, we can find them in Linux.

Anyway, sorry for coming on a little strong there.


On 12/30/2013 06:22 PM, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
> I just got a Toshiba Canvio Desk 2TB external HD that my plans are to 
> delete the NTFS partition and put on an EXT4 one.
>
> Thing is the first 106MB are unallocated.  Why?
>
> If this was a Chinese product, I would be worried.  I actually found a 
> 'call home' USB stick once.  One MIGHT think that Toshiba has decent 
> quality control.  But why the unallocated space; is this for sector 
> replacement?
>
> Actually, I probably would not delete the partition, but only reformat 
> it as EXT4.
>
> Seems to be a rather nice unit.  Drive did not power up until I 
> connected the USB; very convient not to have to unplug it to save on 
> power usage.
>
>