So I have a router with USB storage features, I also have a Raspberry Pi 2 and WD external HDD 1TB.  I want to turn it into a NAS and torrent box, but I'm wondering if leaving external HDD plugged in all the time is safe? By safe I mean the HDD will not break after let's say a year due to constant read/write.
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Okay here is my situation, I have a 1tb internal hard drive that is plugged in via USB Dock, and has external power, that I use for weekly backups, but my question is, is it better to leave this hard drive on all the time, or turn it it off manually when it is not being used? What is the best case scenario?
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Possible Duplicates:             I shut down my laptop every night, and I used to unplug the AC power as well when I shut down. Is there any harm to leaving the power brick plugged in while the laptop is off? Am I wasting energy? Am I causing harm to the battery (which I pretty much leave in all the time)?
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It is possible for a USB storage device to become logically disconnected: the device is still plugged in, but is invisible from the operating system (e.g. it's not listed under /proc/bus/usb). Maybe this can happen to other kinds of USB or other removable devices as well. This can happen for example:   ; after VirtualBox has claimed a USB storage device (the device disappears from the Linux host when it is attached in the guest, and does not automatically reappear if it is detached from the guest).   What is going on in the driver or in the hardware, and most importantly, (how) can the device be logically reconnected (without physically plugging it out and back in)?  Note that this question is not about mounting. In the “logically disconnected” state, the kernel believes there is nothing on the USB bus (and so of course there is no entry under /dev).
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So I have unmounted a usb external hard drive but I went to re-mount it.  Is there a command that I can use to remount the drive?  Only way I know to re-mount a drive is to disconnect the usb cable from my Mac and reconnect it.
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I have an old HP dv7-7210sp laptop and I want to use it as a server. Is it safe to have it turned on 24/7? The server will be used with Nextcloud to backup my data.  Should I remove the battery from the laptop or keep it as a backup power source?  Also, is it safe to run HDD 24/7 or should I enable APM so it spins down after some time of inactivity?  Can the laptop burn if I leave it running?
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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 starting to believe it is not active.  Last night I started up Task Manager and I see 2 disks - Disk 0 (C:) and Disk 1.    Disk 0 appears to be active -    Disk 1 appears to be not active.  It's been this way for at least 3 hours of active use, both Metro and Desktop use.   This is supposed to be the Solid State part of my Hybrid Drive, but it doesn't seem to be doing anything, at least not from the perspective of the Task Manager tool.  Does anyone know of any additional tools that I could you for analysis or do you know if there is some way to activate this part of the drive?  Thank you in advance!
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I want to format my USB stick to ext4 and just use as I would any other typical non-linux format drive (FAT32, exFAT, NTFS).   That is to say, I want to be able to plug the usb stick into any of my linux machines, and read/write to it without needing to adjust permissions, like doing chmod or chown stuff.  I would prefer to use GUI partition software like GParted, rather than command-line commands, though I welcome any solution!  I'm sure a post like this is duplicate flag heaven for some, but after browsing 6~10 SO and forum posts from google, I didn't find a simple solution to my question. Seemed like everything was about adjusting permissions on a per-user basis. Maybe you just cannot use ext4 drives with the same brainless convenience as NTFS.
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Quite often when I'm in a rush, I automatically pull out a USB pendrive or USB cable from an external hard drive from my desktop PC or laptop, without right-clicking on the safely remove icon in the system tray and unplugging via this route. So far nothing untoward has happened every time I have "been in a rush".  What is the rationale behind right clicking on the safely remove icon and can I really lose information on USB media if this is not carried out?  Edit  Is the vunerability of losing such information greatly increased, if the usb media is still flashing at the time of pulling it out of the computer (as opposed to non-flashing)?
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Friend of mine dropped a HDD on the floor and every since the HDD won't mount when connected. It just makes this spinning noise inside for about two rounds and then it goes quiet. Obviously, he wants to salvage the data but I said to him I'll see what I can do knowing the chance of recovery is pretty slim with HDD that won't mount. Was I right about this ? Is there anything I can try I may not know about ? I tried to run gparted on it as I know gparted can detect disks that aren't mounted but connected. But no luck.
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I have a USB-powered external HDD connected to my DELL laptop. Some times, after clicking on "Safely remove" item in pop-up menu of its icon in side bar, the drive is un-mounted and is removed from /dev/ folder (sdb and sdb1 both are removed) and lsusb do not show the device, but the HDD remains spinning and I could sense the vibration by putting my finger on it. But some times a few second after clicking on "Safely remove", it stops spinning and has no vibration. Is there any way (may be a CLI command) to turn it off?
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I'd like to connect an USB storage device to 2 computers at the same time (With a cable, not over the network). Is this possible?  Context: I want my Raspberry Pi to save output on an external USB-storage, and then be able to read the output on a Windows XP PC.
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This morning I went to turn on a family member's laptop to find the SMART message displaying that the laptop's hard disk is close to failure and needs replacing.   The laptop is around 2 years old now and I have now backed everything up just in case of this 'imminent' failure.   I ran the HDTune programme to test the amount of damaged blocks there are in the hard disk.  This resulted in 24/2500 blocks (1%)  To me, (someone who doesn't know a great deal about computer hardware) this doesn't seem like a very large amount and I am not entirely sure where to go from here.   Shall I just suggest to immediately buy a new hard drive for the laptop as this one will just keep on deteriorating?  Or, as everything is now backed up, keep on using the laptop until the inevitable happens which could be; days, weeks or months, as this laptop isn't really used for anything majorly important?  Thanks in advance,  JD
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Hello I want to know if is it possible to mark bad blocks on HDD for OS to not use them. I don't want to save data written on this blocks, just want to get rid of them.  I found some article where author describe how to partition disk to avoid using bad blocks of HDD.  I count how many MB from the start are OK. And also how many MB from end are OK. It looks like I will lost about 50GB of storage space but it is quite fine for me when the disk will run one year more.  First I split disk to 2 partitions:   From beginning to around 190 GB From 190GB to the end   Then I made surface scan of 2nd partition and everything was OK. I was really happy cause i though that finally I will succeed.  Than I wanted to copy all data from 1st partition to 2nd BUT in some data a problem occurs. I/O error. I'd say it is Read problem but when I open file on which copying failed it runs OK, for example some pdf files didn't copied but I opened them.  What can be problem can it be a Write problem? But why there is a problem when surface scan on whole 2nd partition was fine?  What can I do(except buying new HDD)? Can I somehow do this partitioning and use just partition with good sectors? Will it work? How are data stored on the disk? Can I determine where the data will be written?
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I have a 1TB external hard drive of data that I have backed up from my main computer. To save space and give me the option of putting more data on this external HD, I'm considering compressing all of the data.  Windows 7 has the option of compressing a drive (right click on the drive -> Properties -> Compress drive to save space). Is it worth doing this type of compression vs. using something like 7zip to compress all of the contents of the disk? I don't plan on using the data any time soon, the drive is used solely as a back up for emergency situations.
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Can you help me? I want to make my flashdisk write protected. So no one can format my flashdisk because the data inside the flashdisk is important.
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Sometimes I unplug my USB drive only to find out files were not written to it.  I suppose the only way to ensure files are written to it is to right click on the USB drive on the desktop and then select "un-mount", but sometimes I forget.  What is the best way to ensure files are written to the USB drive instantly? This way I can remove the USB drive as soon as I notice the LED light on the USB drive stopped blinking.  OS: CentOS 6