Server Fault Stack Exchange
Server Fault Stack Exchange

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
31
votes
7 answers

Setting Low Disk Space Alerts on Windows Server 2008

I was wondering if there is an easy way to trigger an e-mail alert on Windows Server 2008 when any logical disk partitions become low on space. I have 2 SQL servers that have come close to running out of disk space because of the DB log…
rmwetmore
  • 432
  • 1
  • 5
  • 10
30
votes
2 answers

Why are enterprise SAS disk enclosures seemingly so expensive?

I will begin by stating that I do not believe this is a duplicate of Why is Enterprise Storage so expensive?. My question is specifically about SAS drive enclosures, and justifying their expense. Examples of the types of enclosures I'm referring to…
Sam Elstob
  • 365
  • 1
  • 3
  • 7
29
votes
9 answers

Consumer (or prosumer) SSD's vs. fast HDD in a server environment

What are the pro's and con's of consumer SSDs vs. fast 10-15k spinning drives in a server environment? We cannot use enterprise SSDs in our case as they are prohibitively expensive. Here's some notes about our particular use case: Hypervisor with…
David Budiac
  • 515
  • 1
  • 6
  • 11
28
votes
5 answers

CentOS thinks Disk is busy, can't mount or fsck

I'm a longtime user, and first time question submitter. I've spent a full day searching this and many other sites for a solution, but I must resort to requesting assistance to resolve my situation. History: Our HP Proliant, Centos 5.9 server was…
TripSixes
  • 383
  • 1
  • 3
  • 6
28
votes
2 answers

High disk I/O - jbd2/sda2-8 process

I have run a file server on a CentOS 5.8 final server. My only concern at the moment is what appears to be intermittent but continuous high disk I/O activity causing a general slowdown because of jbd2/sda2-8 process. jbd2/sda2-8 is making use of…
Evan Hamlet
  • 401
  • 1
  • 5
  • 6
28
votes
6 answers

Is a hard drive's serial number globally unique?

On Linux I can use smartctl to get a hard drive's vendor, model, firmware revision and serial number: # smartctl -a /dev/sdb smartctl 5.40 2010-07-12 r3124 [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen,…
Etienne Dechamps
  • 2,194
  • 8
  • 24
  • 28
28
votes
6 answers

What's the effect of standby (spindown) mode on modern hard drives?

I just assembled a new Linux file server with several Samsung HD103UJ 1TB hard drives and I am currently optimizing it. The question I can't find an answer to is: is it reasonable to set a spindown timeout (with hdparm -S) for the drives? Can the…
Peter Krumins
  • 3,500
  • 4
  • 22
  • 20
27
votes
6 answers

Can I detect hardware RAID information from inside Linux?

When I'm inside of Linux, I can get the following information from lsblk (irrelevant drives removed from output): NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT sda 8:0 0 298G 0 disk sdb 8:16 0 2.7T 0 disk When I manually pull the…
IQAndreas
  • 1,550
  • 2
  • 20
  • 39
27
votes
14 answers

Fastest, surest way to erase a hard drive?

I'm looking for a quick, simple, and effective way to erase the hard drives of computers that my company will be getting rid of (donation to charity, most likely). Ideally, I would like a single-purpose bootable utility CD that upon booting, finds…
Mike C.
  • 447
  • 1
  • 6
  • 6
26
votes
2 answers

Linux SSD as HDD cache

I have a Linux server system installed on an SSD and an HDD for user data. As there is space left on the SSD, I want to use it as a read cache for the HDD. Looking at the possibilities, I found: dm-cache: Needs a lot of reads before caching shows…
GxB
  • 431
  • 1
  • 4
  • 9
26
votes
3 answers

How to determine the best byte size for the dd command

I know that doing a dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb does a deep hard drive copy. I've heard that people have been able to speed up the process by increasing the number of bytes that are read and written at a time (default: 512) with the bs option. My…
James T
  • 555
  • 1
  • 4
  • 9
25
votes
3 answers

Reliability of SSD vs HDD (Over large temperature variations)

I've got an application which requires data recording in a outdoor environment, and I am interested in the reliability of SSDs vs HDD when placed in a cold (down to -20) and hot (+50) ambient environments. Intuition leads me to believe SSDs will…
John
  • 353
  • 1
  • 3
  • 8
25
votes
4 answers

Do raid controllers syncronize HDD platter rotation?

I'm in the market for a new storage solution. While researching various specs one of my coworkers said that some raid controllers can synchronize HDD rotation to the effect of all drives' sector/block 0 passes under the reading head at the same…
Mxx
  • 2,362
  • 2
  • 28
  • 40
25
votes
2 answers

In Linux, why isn't superuser root's folder under /home?

You can create a user that has privileges like root, and it's home directory will fall under /home/username. Why does root get its own folder at the top level of the file system? Is this just convention, a security concern, or is there a…
tacos_tacos_tacos
  • 3,250
  • 18
  • 63
  • 100
25
votes
6 answers

Scaling databases with cheap SSD hard drives

I hope that many of you are working with high traffic database-driven websites, and chances are that your main scalability issues are in the database. I noticed a couple of things lately: Most large databases require a team of DBAs in order to…
Dennis Kashkin
  • 391
  • 3
  • 5
1 2
3
…
99 100