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Questions tagged [hard-drive]

Questions about hard disks' performance, issues, tips, and software.

Questions about hard disks performance, issues, tips, and related software, e.g. data recovery or disk test software.

2448 questions
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How to repair the fstab file with current configuration

I'm using Ubuntu 10.04 and i accidently removed all the entries from the fstab files while doing a backup (Yeah, I know ;)). I would like to know if there is a way to rebuild it with the current mount options, since I did not restart the server…
yvoyer
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Is there a reliability difference between 2.5" and 3.5" HDDs?

I know there are a couple of key characteristics that determine the reliability of HDDs, but is there a difference between 2.5" and 3.5" drives? In the past I've always assumed that 3.5" drives were likely to be more robust...but I am now…
Stu Thompson
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How is disk speed measured and what is fast? How long should a copy of 1500 GB take?

How is disk speed measured? Is it Mbit or Mbyte per second read? What is average today and what is fast and what is very fast in the industry? Let's say somebody says it takes a long time to make a copy of a file of 1500 GB (say a database file),…
hol
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Is there a reason to change a server's hard drive before it faults?

Just a quick question: is there a reason to change a server's hard drive after x years before it faults (it eventually will at some point) or should I just leave it until it faults? I have little experience with actual server administration so I…
Spiros
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RAID 5/6 rebuild time calculation

I plan to build some storage schema but I have to anticipate downtime, maintenance and rebuild Time. Some guys said to me that a 10 disk RAID6 of 10To (SATA) rebuild will last for about a week ! and some company policy ask for stopping activity on…
dominix
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Using non-certified hard drives in Dell MD3220 storage array

Is it possible to use non-certified hard drives in a Dell MD3220 storage array? I ended up getting 3 new drives that were the EXACT same model number as the existing ones. Then I bought the drive caddies to go with them. The drives I'm working…
Arvo Bowen
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S-SATA Vs I-SATA (PCH, SCU)

My mother board contains SATA-3 ports however some are listed as S-SATA and I-SATA as shown in the manual: I have plugged some harddrives in each of these ports and they both work fine. However I want to know the difference between these ports and…
johhny B
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How should I store my HDDs?

I have a few HDDs which contain backup data. I want to store them in a secure place. I know some good practices like storing them in a different building so if there is, let's say, a fire, you can still restore the data. But I am more concerned in…
user395136
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Are there any notable advantages (or disadvantages) to using EFI firmware and GPT boot disks in an ESXi environment?

My basic question is, as the title asks: are there any notable advantages (or disadvantages) to using EFI firmware and GPT boot disks in an ESXi environment? By "notable," I mean anything other than the well-known 2 TB limit for MBR disks, and the…
HopelessN00b
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Is SATA-2 backwards compatible with SATA-1?

As per the title, are the two versions compatible?
optician
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On a modern system, will using disk compression give me better overall performance?

It seems that CPU increases have outpaced disk speed for a while. Assuming a desktop or laptop with modern dual core Intel/AMD CPU and a single average SATA disk, would doing compression on most all of the disk give better overall performance?…
kbyrd
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Can you use a USB hard drive in ESXI?

I know that you can install ESXi 4.0 on a thumbdrive, but I was wondering if you could plug in an external harddrive to give extra storage to one of your VMs? We run a fileserver inside of ESXi that needs a space upgrade, but we're thinking of…
semi
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Why are "sectors per track" still relevant on a modern OS with modern drives?

I am building out a new machine and the raid controller is asking me for sectors per track. I haven't had to deal with disk math in a long time (1998?), and I can't find anything that pertains to modern hardware. These are 2TB SAS drives running a…
Ben
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Multiple USB backup targets with Windows Server Backup

I'm trying to add multiple USB external disk targets to a Windows Server 2012 Backup schedule. Having gone through the steps in the GUI to add an additional target, the process fails with the error The system cannot find the path specified. I…
Bryan
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How can I tell what's spinning up my drive?

I have enable "spindown" on one of my Linux server's drives, which is only accessed by a BitTorrent client - meaning, when I don't have torrents running, nothing else should be accessing the disk and waking it up from spindown (right?). But…
Bruno Antunes
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