Quote Originally Posted by enealDC
My advice - use block IO OR don't init file/io volumes.
The initialization process simply uses dd to write zeros out the blocks.

I've never gotten an answer from Open-E on what will happen if you don't init the volume.
We are starting to switch to Block I/O because we want to do synchronous replication with AutoFailover and it only supports Block I/O.

For some reason my initial tests indicated File I/O had better performace, but further testing shows not much difference with Block I/O. This is in a Hyper-V enviroment. Not sure how VMware users are going to be able to do Synchronous Replication since Open-E recommends using File I/O when using this in a VMware environment.