As far as I’m concerned, yes. I’m not even concerned that it be done in the same way, so long as
- It reads and writes every block on the disk, at least once
- It exercises the disk heavily for an extended period of time (I’d say about a week as a minimum; I recall our formerly-resident grinch arguing for closer to a month)
- It will report any block errors or other failures (which SMART attribute monitoring would ordinarily take care of).
I know it’s only anecdotal, but I’ve never noticed any performance degradation while burning in a disk. It certainly wouldn’t have any effect on any pools, as a disk you’re burning in wouldn’t yet be part of a pool. Though it would consume I/O bandwidth for the system, of course.