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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.

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What are the different widely used RAID levels and when should I consider them?

This is a Canonical Question about RAID levels. What are: the RAID levels typically used (including the RAID-Z family)? deployments are they commonly found in? benefits and pitfalls of each?
MDMarra
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All servers flooded by salt water, is it possible to recover data from multi-platter drives?

All of my servers are currently flooded by salt water. Is it possible for each platter in a multi-platter drive to be separated, cleaned, imaged, and merged into a new virtual drive for data recovery?
michael
124
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9 answers

How can I monitor hard disk load on Linux?

Is there a good command line utility to monitor hard disk load on linux? Something like top but then monitoring disk activity i.s.o. cpu usage. More specifically, I suspect that for some (heavy load) servers after several optimizations on various…
Pieter
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How can a single disk in a hardware SATA RAID-10 array bring the entire array to a screeching halt?

Prelude: I'm a code-monkey that's increasingly taken on SysAdmin duties for my small company. My code is our product, and increasingly we provide the same app as SaaS. About 18 months ago I moved our servers from a premium hosting centric vendor to…
Stu Thompson
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100
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17 answers

Does drilling a hole into a hard drive suffice to make its data unrecoverable?

We have a lot of PCs in the company and nobody wants to wipe a multitude of hard drives. We also have many apprentice toolmakers who really want to destroy things. Thus, every couple of months, our apprentices receive two heavy baskets of hard…
RubbelDieKatz
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Is it better practice to buy RAID disks individually vs. in bulk?

This may sound like an odd question, but it's generated some spirited discussion with some of my colleagues. Consider a moderately sized RAID array consisting of something like eight or twelve disks. When buying the initial batch of disks, or buying…
smitelli
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SSD or HDD for server

Issue I have read many discussions about storage, and whether SSDs or classic HDDs are better. I am quite confused. HDDs are still quite preferred, but why? Which is better for active storage? For example for databases, where the disk is active all…
genderbee
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17 answers

Does orientation affect hard drive lifespan?

Are there any studies or evidence which show that mounting a hard drive horizontally is better than vertically for the lifespan of the device? Or upside down, or any direction for that matter.
Bob
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62
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8 answers

What are the advantages of tape drives?

IBM still develop and sell tape drives today. The capacity of them seems to be on a par with today's hard drives, but the search time and transfer rate are both significantly lower than that of hard drives. So when is tape drives preferable to hard…
kba
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Is it possible to on-line shrink a EXT4 volume with LVM?

Today I tried this on my machine with OpenSUSE 12.3 (kernel 3.7): # resize2fs /dev/mapper/system-srv 2G resize2fs 1.42.6 (21-Sep-2012) Filesystem at /dev/mapper/system-srv is mounted on /srv; on-line resizing required resize2fs: On-line shrinking…
Alicia
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7 answers

dd on entire disk, but do not want empty portion

I have a disk, say /dev/sda. Here is fdisk -l: Disk /dev/sda: 64.0 GB, 64023257088 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7783 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size…
Jonathan Henson
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7 answers

How can I successfully mount an 8-bit SCSI drive on a modern computer?

I have a number of internal 8-bit SCSI-1 drives that I'd like to archive for historical purposes. These are all the old NeXT Cubes and NeXTStations (monochrome and color) that were used by id Software to create DOOM and Quake. I'd like to donate…
Don MacAskill
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How do I destroy a hard disk?

I have an old hard disk (Maxtor 250Gb) from about 3 years ago that started giving errors and now sits in a draw in my desk. It has some confidential data on it but it's unlikely that it can be read because the disk started to go bad. However, before…
Guy
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10 answers

Linux on VMware - why use partitioning?

When installing Linux VMs in a virtualized environment (ESXi in my case), are there any compelling reasons to partition the disks (when using ext4) rather than just adding separate disks for each mount point? The only one I can see is that it makes…
savoche
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47
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3 answers

What are the merits of SAS vs SATA drives?

What are the merits of buying SAS drives over SATA drives, or vice versa?
username
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