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The first hard drive I used was a 40 MB Seagate, $900 in 1989. It was the size of a hefty phone book. The first NetApp Filer I used had 4 GB drives, total capacity a few hundred GB, don't recall cost (not cheap), in 1997. It was the size of a small closet. The first EMC I used had drives of size I don't recall, total capacity in the TB, for unimaginable prices, in 2000. It was the size of small room. We're up to 8 TB…
I used Fastrand. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_FASTRAND
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't do it because of the time constraints. Lets say it takes 30 seconds to do one individual drive. But in your article you claim that the unlabeled Toshiba drives lengthen the maintenance time by "a few minutes" every time they fail. Since all drives eventually fail, wouldn't it make sense to trade those "few minutes" at the end of the lifecycle for a constant 30 seconds at the beginning?
Certainly, at least mathematically. If we ramp up the Toshiba purchases and cannot get them pre-labeled, we'll definitely do it on our end, though we think we'll be able to get them labeled ahead of time from some channel partners. At least we hope, signs look good :)
Given that you have multiple vendors and you also seem to have a risk even in handling any drive, I would suggest that asset tagging the disks and using a bluetooth scanner, or android data entry app, would make sense for all your disk assets. You can then automatically document and track the entire lifecycle of a disk live, as it is inserted or removed.
Your refusal to generate your own labels seems strange.