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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 much space should you leave free on a hard disk?

Is there a rule of thumb for how much space to leave free on a hard disk? I used to hear you should leave at least 5% free to avoid fragmentation. [I know the answer depends on usage (eg: video files vs text), size of disk, RAID level, disk format,…
username
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How to format as FAT32 from Windows 7/Vista

What is the best way to format a USB drive with FAT32 (for Mac compatibility) from within Windows 7/Vista? I ask because the Disk Management only lets you pick exFAT (because the disk is over 32 GB I believe). Doing it from the command line with…
Schneider
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How are SMART selftests related to badblocks?

The smartctl tool allows initiating a long self-test (smartctl -t long /dev/sda). However there's also badblocks that I can run on a drive. How are the two related? If badblocks detects bad blocks, does the drive automatically update its SMART…
Hongli Lai
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How do I protect business critical data against fire?

We have 72 hard drives that contain our webcast inventory. The number is increasing. We're located in a frame building and we are afraid of not only fire, but catastrophic fire. I've priced fireproof safes that hold to the required 125F for hard…
Bill Knowles
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Differences between /dev/sda and /dev/sda1

I know that /dev/sda is the raw device, and that /dev/sda1 is the partition or virtual device. But I'm a little confused as to why the sda# only comes up some of the time, or only on certain systems. What causes this to occur? Perhaps the times when…
decoy
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13 answers

High Failure Rate of Large Drives?

I recently deployed a server with 5x 1TB drives (I won't mention their brand, but it was one of the big two). I was initially warned against getting large capacity drives, as a friend advised me that they have a very low MTBF, and I would be better…
Mark Henderson
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How do I easily repair a single unreadable block on a Linux disk?

My Linux system has started throwing SMART errors in the syslog. I tracked it down and believe the problem is a single block on the disk. How do I go about easily getting the disk to reallocate that one block? I'd like to know what file got…
Nelson
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what is exactly an URE?

I have been looking into RAID5 Vs RAID6 lately and I keep seeing that RAID5 is not secure enough anymore because of the URE ratings and increasing size of the drives. Basically, most of the content I found says that in RAID5, in case you have a disk…
Memes
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Would SSD drives benefit from a non-default allocation unit size?

The default allocation unit size recommended when formatting a drive in our current set-up is 4096 bytes. I understand the basics of the pros and cons of larger and smaller sizes (performance boost vs. space preservation) but it seems the benefits…
davebug
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5 answers

SSD head / cylinder / cluster details

A customer of ours makes industrial robots that run on very old, but stable, hardware and software. The only bottleneck has always been the hard drive in these moving machines. Due to constant movement (shocks etc.) HDDs normally don't survive…
Knelis
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4 answers

How can I connect a SAS drive to USB?

I have a Dell T710 with Seagate Cheetah 15k.7 SAS disks. If the T710 motherboard dies, I'll need to resort to one of my nightly off-site backups and salvage the journal/logfile from the SAS disk to bring the backup bang up-to-date. I need a way…
dave
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Can "enterprise" drives be safely replaced by near/midline in some situations?

When specifying servers, like (I would assume) many engineers who aren't experts in storage, I'll generally play it safe (and perhaps be a slave to marketing) by standardising on a minimum of 10k SAS drives (and therefore are "enterprise"-grade with…
dbr
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Is it possible that just one bit switches so my file shows me a letter "Q" instead of a "S"

In our application we use Hibernate and PostgreSQL to store data. In one of our database tables we have a discriminator column which says for example "TIPPSPIEL". It is a fixed string and can not be manipulated by any user. Suddenly we had one entry…
Janning
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Are RDX removable disks a good replacement for LTO tape?

Over a period of three weeks, I experienced six complete failures of LTO-1 and LTO-2 tape drives at client sites. Some had failed mechanisms. Others lost the ability to write reliably. These were HP Ultrium 232, 448 and 460 drives. Most of these…
ewwhite
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RAID-6: better to replace two dead drives at the same time, or one at a time?

We have a 16-drive RAID-6 that has three problem drives. Two are already dead, and the third is giving SMART warnings. (Nevermind how it got in such a bad state.) Obviously we want to replace the dead drives before the one that is still working, but…
Warren Young
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