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Questions tagged [hardware]

Computer hardware is the collection of physical elements that comprise a computer system.

There are multiple, physical components that are required for a computer to function. This is collectively referred to as the "hardware". The most notable components inside of a computer system is the RAM, Hard Disk (or hard drive), CPU, and Power Supply.

Outside of the case, however, hardware exists as well. Some of these components include the keyboard, mouse, and monitor.

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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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How Serviceable are Tape Drives?

I'm contemplating an auto-loading tape drive as part of a backup strategy. This would be my first experience with tape backup. The cost-effectiveness of tape drives seems to depend on the assumption that they will provide many years of service. …
alx9r
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Removing raid metadata from drives

Normally when I have a drive which contains raid metadata e.g. from fakeraid or a hardware raid card I can get rid of it with: dmraid -r -E /dev/sdX Or if that doesnt work, doing a simple dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX normally works But I have four…
Tiffany Walker
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Can I mix Low Voltage (LV) ram wiith Regular Voltage RAM?

I heard from our vendor that it is okay to put Low Voltage ram with regular voltage RAM. They said all that would happen is that the LV RAM would ramp up to match the 1.5v ram (in other words, the ram won't run at LV). Can anyone confirm from…
Kyle Brandt
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Is there a Linux equivalent of CPU-z?

I need to inventory the hardware on some Linux clients I recently "inherited". In the past, on Windows, I've used the excellent CPU-z to generate the hardware inventory. Is there a Linux equivalent?
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What effects do magnets have on HDDs and SSDs?

What do magnets do to hard disk drives and solid state drives upon contact?
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Recommendations for Elastic Search hardware

Are there any good guides for hardware level to support ElasticSearch? Are recommendations for Lucene or Solr a good place to start? We're looking at rolling out a deployment starting with 27 million documents, 8TB of data add 300k documents per…
James Socol
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Where do you find your MTBF data?

Mean time between failures may be difficult to interpret, but there is a wealth of statistical method that you can use if you have some hard data. Trouble is, nobody reports their MTBF numbers anymore. (Other than hard drive manufacturers,…
user9495
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Cost effective way to build a server with lots of RAM

I have a Java application where scalability is primarily limited by RAM, that I would like to run on one or more servers in a datacenter. Where should I be looking for server hardware that can accommodate 100GB - 512GB or more of RAM? I'm not an…
sanity
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What is this column in /proc/interrupts?

Can someone assist me in analyzing the data in this output from my /proc/interrupts file? $ cat /proc/interrupts CPU0 CPU1 0: 22 0 IR-IO-APIC 2-edge timer 1: 2 0 IR-IO-APIC 1-edge …
Matt K
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Should I be concerned about our server setup?

I work for a company of about 50 people. Our two servers (identical) are custom built with these specs: Xeon E3-1270 V3 Intel Entry Server Board 32 GB DDR3 ECC 2x 256 GB SSD RAID1 (for System) 4x 1TB SSD RAID10 (for Hyper-V VMs) Windows Server 2012…
Martin Walter
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GUI tools to administer Linux Box

What GUI tools do you advise to improve the usability of Linux for those accustomed to doing system administration the windows-way? Users new to Linux often get confused when they need to configure something: editing a text configuration file may…
kolypto
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Automated hardware testing of HP servers?

As part of provisioning servers we run HP's Insight Diagnostics to test the hardware. This is a manual process. Is there a way automate the running of Insight Diagnostics? There is the hpdiags software with the option "-rd:" "Run a diagnosis of all…
Mark Wagner
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General Advice about an archive solution. ~15tb and growing.

I need a better storage and archive system for my small business's files. Specifically the files are completed video projects. Beyond time and cost limitations what is holding me back is I don't believe in any of the solutions I have pondered.…
maestrojed
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Proper method for connecting multiple non-stackable network switches?

I deal with many clients in warehousing and industrial applications who have IT staff or local consultants. Many of these sites are still using a 10/100 Megabit switching backbone... I've managed to get some clients to invest in networking as a part…
ewwhite
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