I heard on the internet that defragmenting an SSD is quite harmful. I was wondering if it is true, and if so, why? I've already done it a few times and it didn't seems to be broken at all.
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I keep hearing that this is a huge no-no. Why is this? I run Ubuntu mostly so it doesn't affect me, but I was just wondering.
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I have an 2010 27" iMac with an SSD and a regular hard drive. Now that I've been using the machine for some time and have not come close to filling the SSD, I'd like to disable the spinning hard drive completely. Why? It makes a loud humming sound when it runs, and I don't use it for anything. Anything I can do short of taking apart this monster and ripping it out?  UPDATE: As of 3-Apr-2012 and OS X 10.7.3, the solution below works. Some programs occasionally spin up the drive, but it only hums for about 5 minutes then goes back to sleep.
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Why is defragmenting unnecessary in Ubuntu?
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Does it stil make much difference, now that we have much faster and larger HDDs? Generally I find if disk performance is getting too slow, it's probably because of too little free space, and the solution is to buy a new HDD.
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If you have a private data on a recent, normal hard drive - how many passes do you need to delete the data to make it unrecoverable?  Not in the sense, that a forensic team of 20 experts with a budget of 100 million euro or dollars and 10 years of time to restore a couple of bytes from a known address with 80% accuracy, but few people with a few 1000 €/$ budget, who wouldn't spend more than two weeks on the job, and who don't know where on the drive they are searching.   Linux/GNU shred says in the manual:     -n, --iterations=N           overwrite N times instead of the default (3)   but on the one hand I heard about an NSA suggestion to overwrite 27 times, and on the other hand professional data recovery firms could not recover data from a drive that was wiped just once.   Evidence, papers, proof?  Note: What this question is not:    It's not about bad sectors, where data might slip through It's not about old MFM/RLL-drives from the early 90ies  It's not about different tools It's not so much about the method (random numbers 0s, 0xFF and fancy patterns).  It's not about different techniques to wipe it securely (magnetic power, melting, filling with sand and turning).  It's not about special problems of flash drives
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Somehow I happened to swap out 14 GB of memory. After having killed the culprit, I have tons of free memory again, so I thought I could  again. So with 5 GB out of 32 GB used and 14 GB of swap space used, I ran swapoff -a.... and 4 hours later about half of the work was finished.  This means less that 1 MB/s, while I can easily copy 200 MB/s. My swap is encrypted but so are all normal partitions and with  it leads to no noticeable CPU load (and filling the swap space took only a few minutes). I see that there's no special reason to optimize swapoff, however I wonder how it could get that slow?    Just adding some more data: My main memory is 32 GB and I have 32 GB swap space on each of 4 harddisks (surely an overkill, but who cares?). The whole swap space can be  (decrypted and) read in less than 5 minutes:  time -p sudo sh -c 'for i in /dev/mapper/cryptswap?; do md5sum $i &amp; done; wait' 014a2b7ef300e11094134785e1d882af  /dev/mapper/cryptswap1 a6d8ef09203c1d8d459109ff93b6627c  /dev/mapper/cryptswap4 05aff81f8d276ddf07cf26619726a405  /dev/mapper/cryptswap3 e7f606449327b9a016e88d46049c0c9a  /dev/mapper/cryptswap2 real 264.27   Reading a part of a partition can't be slower than reading it all. Yet reading about 1/10th of it takes about 100 times longer.  I observed that during swapoff both the CPU was mostly idle (maybe 10% of one core) and so were the disks ("measured" by the LEDs). I also saw that the swap spaces were turned off one after the other.
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What is a good and cheap solution for online backup of over 100Gb, probably growing to 200+ in about a year, and then no doubt more after that.  I am looking for something that can work in the background on a mac. I am using Aperture 3. The cost is the limiting factor. I have thought about an external HDD, but I want my data in another place to keep it safe.
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It is conventional wisdom¹ that each time you spin a hard disk down and back up, you shave some time off its life expectancy.  The topic has been discussed before:       Common explanations for why spindowns and spinups are harmful are that they induce more stress on the mechanical parts than ordinary running, and that they cause heat variations that are harmful to the device mechanics.  Is there any data showing quantitatively how bad a spin cycle is? That is, how much life expectancy does a spin cycle cost? Or, more practically, if I know that I'm not going to need a disk for X seconds, how large should X be to warrant spinning down?  ¹  But conventional wisdom has been wrong before; for example, it is commonly held that hard disks should be kept as cool as possible, but the  shows that cooler drives actually fail more. This study is no help here since all the disks surveyed were powered on 24/7.
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Is it necessary or recommended practice to eject external drives before logging out, restarting, or shutting down? (The drives are not being unplugged.)  BTW, I am aware that I need to eject my external drives before unplugging them, I just don't know if it's necessary when logging out or shutting down. It seems to me this should be obvious, but I can't find an explicit answer to this question anywhere. I am interested in answers for Snow Leopard, Lion &amp; Mountain Lion OS versions, as I have 2 machines, one with Snow Leopard, the other with Lion, &amp; I'll soon be upgrading Lion to Mountain Lion.
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I want to build a new PC with a smallish SSD.  I'd like to be able to install some of my games onto the drive (those I care about loading quickly or I play frequently), but have the rest of them on a larger, slower drive.  Anybody know if this is possible?  I'm kind of guessing it's not, but figured I'd ask anyway.
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What are the benefits of paying for SSD storage when it comes to webhosting? I know that SSDs have better read speeds is that necessarily better or is it negligible?  I have sites that use databases with php so will it really benefit me to pay extra for SSD storage? I read somewhere that SSDs increase fetching times from the db but also read stuff that are contrary to it and the fact that I can cache mysql results using apc or memcached so kind of confused, can someone shed some light please?
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After moving to SSD I deleted the System Partition (100MB) from my previous drive, causing mass destruction.  I tried to delete the System Partition which windows 7 creates (on my previous disc as I moved to SSD) and when I tried to extend the main partition size to include the new Unallocated Space it asked me if I wanted to convert the disc to Dynamic.  I simply pressed yes and the partition simply disappeared into unallocated space. All of my family pictures / videos lost.  After reading an article on Microsoft they said to recreate the partition with the same exact size, so I tried to do that but it didn't work. I did not format the drive at all when I created partitions.  How can I possibly recover the partitions?  Thanks!
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Id like to disable the low disk space warning, ideally for a single drive in Windows 8.  My gut feeling is that is it will be an all or nothing change.  Any ideas?
63846
In a few hours I'll have a new 500GB Sony laptop, filled with the usual Sony rubbish which I'll promptly be replacing with Ubuntu or Crunchbang or something. However, first I want to make a full clone of the drive (including recovery partitions), should I wish to return it to Sony or sell it on in its factory state.  The problem is that the only backup drives I have are less than 500GB - the biggest I have is 250GB or so! So I need to backup and compress on-the-fly.  What's the best way to do this? Presumably dd piped into gzip would do the trick, or does anyone have any other suggestions to accomplish this?
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Q1: Can forcibly powering off a PC without using the built-in shutdown/reboot functions, cause a HDD to accumulate bad sectors? Whether it be the result of BSODs, lockups, crashes, etc.   Q2: If so, are these bad sectors repairable? I know an OS typically relocate bad sectors to other areas of the drive, but once a drive accumulates too many it just dies.   I have read up and saw things about 'soft' and 'hard' bad sectors. One caused by software and the other being actual physical damage. The reason I am asking this is because I have had several HDDs die on me in the past year, far before their estimated lifespan, and one thing they all had in common was that I had forcibly powered off my PC a lot.
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I'm going to move from HDD to SSD (60GB) + HDD (250GB) setup. Basicly I want the system to be fast. Root partition will be on SSD but I'm not sure what to do with /home. All data like /pictures /documents will be linked to HDD that will be in a removable caddy adapter in my thinkpad. From time to time I might need to remove it and plug in a CD-ROM. This way I guess some part of /home partition will have to be on SSD to make the system bootable.   Does anyone has some tips? It's also important that the Eclipse and Browsers (Opera,Firefox) will run fast. Is it also enough to just copy the partition to SSD to I will have to make a clean install?
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I am asking myself which constellation is better: should I stock up my RAM up to 16GB (from 8GB), or should I buy a SSD with 128GB??   I really dont know :/  Cheers!  BTW: My macbook supports 16GB RAM, i already checked this ;)