Given the appalling reliability of modern disks, any feature that helps ensure data integrity and early detection of failure has to be deemed a good thing. What caught my attention recently is that all of the Seagate Barracuda disks I have (a number of ST31000333AS, ST31000340AS and ST31000528AS models) support the Write-Read-Verify feature. But there is a snag – disks from different batches, even for the same model, seem to disagree about the default state of this feature. Worse, the feature gets reset to it’s default setting on every reboot. This wouldn’t be a problem if the usual tool for such things on Linux, hdparm, had an option for controlling the state of this feature – but it doesn’t. So I wrote a patch to add control of write-read-verify capability to hdparm. Hopefully this will help keep your data a little safer.