I've been running the script on 2 new drives simultaneously and saw this in the log for one of them: Jul 16 20:40:24 preclear_disk_ZR5*: Zeroing: zeroing the disk started 1 of 5 retries... Jul 16 20:40:24 preclear_disk_ZR5*: Zeroing: emptying the MBR. Jul 17 01:11:58 preclear_disk_ZR5*: Zeroing: progress - 25% zeroed @ 239 MB/s Jul 17 06:04:57 preclear_disk_ZR5*: Zeroing: progress - 50% zeroed @ 217 MB/s Jul 17 11:38:18 preclear_disk_ZR5*: Zeroing: progress - 75% zeroed @ 181 MB/s Jul 17 19:04:08 preclear_disk_ZR5*: killing smartctl with pid 1024462 - probably stalled ... Jul 17 19:04:08 preclear_disk_ZR5*: Pause (smartctl run time: 35s) Jul 17 19:04:10 preclear_disk_ZR5*: Paused Jul 17 19:04:30 preclear_disk_ZR5*: Resumed Jul 17 19:04:33 preclear_disk_ZR5*: Zeroing: zeroing the disk completed! After some searching I'm unable to find much about this, was just curious if anyone knows if could mean there's something up with the drive or if a stall in smartctl is something that can just happen. Sadly I can't look in the system log for when it happened because some other script was seemingly executing smartctl --scan every 8 seconds that I've since killed.