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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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Get drive power state without waking it up

Is there any way how to determine whether some drive is sleeping without occasionally waking it up? I have tried hdparm -C and smartctl -i but both of them actually wake it up when its already sleeping. I need to set up a script that regularly…
NumberFour
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Optimal UNIX File System Partition + Setup Strategy

When partitioning a new system disk(s) for UNIX, what is your prefered strategy for both desktop and/or servers? Please include disk partition layout, file system format(s) and options, mount points, RAID level(s), LVM groups and volumes,…
cmcginty
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Is S.M.A.R.T. smart to use?

A few years ago I was told to avoid S.M.A.R.T. like the plague. The reasoning was that the stress the testing puts on the drive will actually cause it to fail. Is this still the case? If not, what is a reasonable frequency to run tests? If I should…
Bob
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Is online disk resize possible with KVM?

We're evaluting KVM for Linux virtualization on a few projects. All is going well so far. But one of our requirements is the ability to add disk space to a running guest without rebooting or taking it offline. Is this possible with KVM? The only…
Eil
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How do I mount sub-directory to a hard drive in Linux?

Let us assume that I have two hard drives (A,B) and have the following directories: /var/www /var/www/upload Currently if I upload a file to /var/www OR /var/www/upload ; it will be saved in drive A. How do I make the folder /var/www/upload point…
-provideralbarak
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How often should I scrub my RAID?

In general I would like to know how often a RAID array needs to be scrubbed. What contributes to the need to scrub more often (reading data?, writing data?, unexpected shutdowns?, drive age?, drive size?, number of users?, etc.)? I've been reading…
mrfred
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Why is this SSD drive failing with bad sectors, and was it predictable?

Note: this question was previously closed as off-topic. You can read the discussion. My reasons for asking it here are: This drive is in an offline content cache server for schools in rural Zambia. The servers are created from disk images, and all…
qris
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SAS vs. Nearline/MDL SAS - What is the difference?

As subject I guess, looking at SAN's and most vendors offer 10k or 15k "proper" SAS drives, many also offer 7.2k MDL/Nearline SAS drives. Does anyone have an authoritative explanation of the difference please?
flooble
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SATA Disks that handle write caching properly?

It's pretty common to see advice to disable the write cache on individual disks used for databases because otherwise some disks will acknowledge writes that haven't yet made it to the disk surface. This implies that some disks don't acknowledge…
eas
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Dismount USB External Drive using powershell

I am attempting to dismount an external USB drive using powershell and I cannot successfully do this. The following script is what I use: #get the Win32Volume object representing the volume I wish to eject $drive = Get-WmiObject Win32_Volume…
JB.
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How do storage IOPS change in response to disk capacity?

All other things being equal, how would a storage array's IOPS performance change if one used larger disks. For example, take an array with 10 X 100GB disks. Measure IOPS for sequential 256kb block writes (or any IOPS metric) Let's assume the…
JDS
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Convert a hard-drive into a VMWare machine

I have a hard-drive from a dead server, and I would like to convert it to a virtual machine. (original system OS is windows 2003) I know VMWare converter can convert a physical machine to a VMWare image, but is there any way to convert a hard drive…
DrStalker
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How do limit disc i/o during backup?

I have a cron that basically do a simple "tar zcf" in the night. The server has: 8 Cores - Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5606 @ 2.13GHz 25GB RAM Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS Hardware RAID 1 (LSI Logic / Symbios Logic MegaRAID SAS SMC2108) with two 2.728TB…
acemtp
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Hard drive fail - How to regain confidence on the drive or make some use of it

After a hard drive fail (lots of corrupted sectors) I reformat it, but the drive give me no confidence to use it in production. Is there a tool to stress test so I know I can use it? In which ways would you use the drive so if it fails again you…
Eduardo Molteni
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Equivalent of SysInternals FileMon for Linux?

I'm attempting to debug an application on Ubuntu - I need to listen to file open attempts (even for files that don't exist). Process Monitor (formerly known as FileMon) is available on Windows - what's on Ubuntu's utility belt? Thanks! Ashley
chickeninabiscuit
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