I have a man cave that has to hold all my toys, so my large collection of computers with spinning hard drives is about 10 feet from my drum set. The drum set is largely idle, but my kid is now old enough to start playing, and I fear for my spinners.  Are the tolerances of WD blue hard drives such that I shouldn't worry about it?
120994
I've gotten my hands on a seriously cheap laptop grade 2.5 inch drive. I'm intending to use one on a desktop that doesn't have 2.5 inch bays as a boot drive. While I know there are adapters available, I know its fairly common with SSDs to simply velcro/tape the drive somewhere. I'm wondering if I can do the same with a laptop hard drive.  One issue I see here is SSDs are fairly insensitive to vibration, while hard drives are. Just how vibration sensitive are drives? Would a jerry rigged mount need to take this into account?
101999
Hi guys I have question about how two different Hard disk setups can possibly affect performance of my database.   I have two Options.  Option 1:  One Physical Harddisk and then Multiple Virtual hard drives for SQL Server's Database files (.mdf , .ndf),Log files, TempDB, Backups etc   Option 2:  One Physical Harddisk and then One huge Virtual hard drive for SQL Server's Database files (.mdf , .ndf),Log files, TempDB, Backups etc     To my knowledge, If these were all physical hard drives, having multiple drives for all these files (tempDB, Log file, backups, database files), would definitely benefit from  parallel processing.  But is there any drawbacks of having one massive Virtual Hard drive vs multiple Virtual Hard drives as in reality, when Sql Server is reading or writing , it will be all done from one Physical Hard disk?   Is one method preferred over other? Any suggestions or pointers in the right direction is much appreciated. Thanks
119430
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.
34408
Is there any way to determine what the maximum capacity hard drive is that I can use in my laptop?
61162
A guy I work with just came by to ask me about a damaged thumb drive/USB flash drive.  Apparently his son dropped it on a hard surface and it won't power up anymore.  They've tried plugging it into multiple machines without success, even though each port they tried was able to power other USB devices.  He knows it's not a lost cause because a local tech store is offering to recover the data for $500, but he says they're not worth that much.  I figured someone on SU would have an idea about this; he doesn't care about using the drive in the future, just wants to salvage a few files that would be a pain to recreate.  Is this possible without advanced equipment, and if so, how?  He said he already tried the advice on the Internet about typing in different drive letters and such, but that failed because there was no power going to the drive.  He also said that he opened the case up at one point, but I'm not sure what, if anything, he did inside.
10021
I have an 1 TB data disk and the bios and Windows are reporting a "Smart" error. At least, I get a Smart event but it doesn't indicate how serious the failure could be. My system is about 6 months old, including the disk so the warranty will cover the damage. Unfortunately, I lack a second disk of 1 TB in size which I can use to make a full backup. The most important data on this disk is safe, but there's a lot of work data which can be regenerated but this would cost a lot of time.  So I ordered an USB disk of 1 TB which will arrive in three days. By then I can make a full backup of the data and afterwards, it can crash.  But will the disk live that long? (Well, I won't use the PC as long as I can't make a backup.) How serious is such a Smart event? I know it's serious enough to have it replaced, but will it live for another week or could it die any moment?Update: I purchased an 1 TB external disk and spent most of the day making a backup of the 1 TB disk. It survived that. I then received a new disk, since it was still under warranty and replaced the hard disk. Then I had to spend most of a day again to put back the backup. I need to send back the faulty disk and now have an additional external disk, which could always be practical. :-)  The Smart Error report did not cause any failures on the original disk. I won't advise to ignore these warnings, but the disk still has enough life in it to last a few more days. (Just make sure you have a good back-up.)  And oh, the horror of having to make a complete backup such a huge disk. :-) If your data is important, make sure you have something that supports incremental backups and lots of space. (In my case, the data wasn't very important, just practical to have on-disk together.)
104386
A potential customer wants to evaluate our storage system. They run Windows 2008R2 x64 with 4KB NTFS on a virtual test machine they've sent us. They did not seem to know this at hand, so I think it's reasonable to assume that environment was not tweaked. The tests are inserting, indexing, searching, deleting. Tool is not known to me.  Given that the windows NTFS block size is 4KB, and SQL write in 64KB chunks - is it safe to assume that a block size of 64k on the SAN is a good choice?  They run SQL Server 2008, perhaps standard.
2113
So, let's say your server had 6 healthy hard drives.  A drive fails (will not mount/detect, drops out of raid with errors) or is failing (SMART getting worse, etc).  You need to swap out the bad drive.  When you open the case you see.. six identical hard drives.  How can you tell which one is no longer healthy/mounting/functioning?  System would be linux, most likely ubuntu server, using at most simple software RAID.  The hard drives would be SATA and connected directly to the motherboard. (no raid controller)   I don't want to randomly disconnect drives until I pick the correct one.  The drives all appear identical to me; I imagine there is some common way to identify which drive is which that I am unaware of.  Does anyone have any pointers/tips/best practices?  Thanks!  EDIT: I had wanted this to be 'generalized' in a hand-wavy sort of way, but it just came off as 'incomplete' and 'horrible'.  My bad!
110280
I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with my brand new Seagate ST2000DM001(-9YN164) hard drive, if indeed anything. Irregularly, but seemingly every few minutes (every 3-7 minutes now in the time I've been timing it), it makes a short (0.2 seconds tops), fairly high-pitched, two-part sound. It's definitely not normal "working noise", and there doesn't seem to be any correlation to disk activity.  The odd thing is that when I was using the drive with a USB-SATA adapter (one of those dongle things, not a plug-in cradle), sitting on top of the computer case with a paper magazine for insulation, it did not make any unusual noises during the copying of around 1 TB of data from the internal drive (which was showing signs of starting to fail, including reporting uncorrectable read errors during a routine file system scan). The change after that is that I removed the old internal drive, replaced it with the new one and re-fitted the SATA data and power cables.  I used GSmartControl, which presents smartctl data (I'm running Debian 6.0 on this system) to inspect the drive's SMART data, paying particular attention to the Start/Stop Count (shown as: norm-ed value 100, worst 100, threshold 20, raw value 5), Seek Error Rate (66, 65, 30, 3981634) and  (100, 100, 97, 0) (intermittent spin-up or seek errors was my first hypothesis, but the data doesn't seem to support it). None of these values seem to be changing, and everything (both pre-failure and old-age) says failed "never", which IMO is to be expected on a drive that has only been in service for a few days. The seek error rate raw value seems high but unless it's growing rapidly I don't see that as being a major cause for concern. Using the same tool I also ran conveyance and short self-tests, both of which completed without errors and show a lifetime hours value of 41 in the test log. I'm currently running an extended drive self-test (including a disk surface scan) but frankly don't think that will turn up anything of much interest. One thing that certainly is interesting, however, is that in the a little over 15 minutes now that the extended self-test has been running, I haven't heard any such noise, which, if nothing else, further points to something about the new drive being the culprit (I haven't been doing anything else differently in this time).  Using hdparm, I disabled power savings by as root running hdparm -S 0 /dev/sda (where /dev/sda is the drive in question). This had no apparent effect.  Any ideas would be appreciated.  EDIT: Following the suggestion of @totaam, I turned the computer off completely (including the master switch at the back of the PSU), then restarted, and gradually added complexity. Everything was fine as far as I could tell through runlevel 1, but at runlevel 2 (which in Debian is multiuser with X, so basically the kitchen sink got thrown in at this point) the drive started exhibiting the same behavior again. So, I looked at what was started when entering runlevel 2, looking for any possible culprits, and found acpid as a clear candidate. Disabling that, however, doesn't seem to have helped, even after re-running hdparm manually. I will take a close look at the BIOS settings as well, but in the meantime, here is a list of what was started entering runlevel 2, in order; does anyone else see any possible culprits? (And Seek Error Rate is still climbing, now up to raw value 4008400.)   statd rsyslogd binfmt-support acpid (now removed) virtualbox-ose (host kernel modules) timidity dbus hald anacron atd gdm avahi-daemon cron cupsd kerneloops cpufreq ntpd postfix sshd
28064
I want to convert the 3TB 80% full ext4 block device into btrfs and I want to estimate the time it will take. I understand that this process is disk-bound rather then cpu- or memory-bound. So can anyone explain me how long it will take in units of time it takes to read/write the whole volume?
122113
I have 4 hard disk drives that have temperatures which go beyond the recommended 50 degrees (Celsius). (I have several Samsung Spinpoint F3 which are 1Tb each and they do have good temps, between 32 and 35 degrees. That's normal for me. But in this case, 50+ is not normal.)  I have already read the question and answer provided , but none of the solutions  helped. What tools can I use or what terminal commands should I execute to lower the temperature of these drives?  And on a similar note, if I were to use a method similar to , how would I know which hard drive I am reading?   Where can I check to see which HDD is related to, for example, /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/link_power_management_policy ?  I have already tested powertop, hddtemp, disks and others to check and try to lower the temp with no luck.
74170
Suppose we have a harddisk with 2 platters with characteristics below:     Rotational rate: 10, 000 RPM   Avg sectors/track: 1000   Surfaces: 4   Sector size: 512 bytes   I was reading "Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective 2ed" when I found that it calculates transfer time as if it only uses ONE head to read a sector. If that's the case, why not use 4 heads to write(read) on 4 surfaces? So when I write a 2K bytes file, each head should only need to wait for the platters to rotate just one sector length instead of 4, thus reducing the transfer time by a factor of 4. Or even redesign sector to make each sector on one cylinder but on 4 tracks residing same position respectively on 4 surfaces. Each one of (512/4) bytes. So when the hd needs to read a sector of 512 bytes, we only need the disk to rotate roughly 1/4 compare to original time.  The idea looks like RAID 0.
68951
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?
78743
I'm asking this because my HDD (Hard Disk) has 5 years, and ultimately (this year) it gave me many headaches. Many moths ago I has Windows 7 (and 10 T.P. since april) and all was good. But after a moment, instantly, all gets reversed: veeery slow, and actions which will take a tiny time, at these moment the time seems frozen (for example, instead a 1 minute boot, it turned to 5-8 minutes boot). I formatted and installed Windows every 2 months because it was the time which runs good before it gets slooww. Seeing the abuse of privacity in W10, I changed to Ubuntu 15.04 and the things lasted more in time... But again, HDD error. Click, trying to read, click, trying to read... And the upper bar (title of window/buttons of volume, language, wifi, etc.) disappeared. The left bar (where are the app's icons) was empty and the file explorer said the resource wasn't available (or something like these error). I restarted and nothing happens. I had to press CTRL+D to boot-up Ubuntu, but after hours... the same error (can't do anything except moving the mouse/cursor).  Welcome to the routine: copy files with live-cd to a pendrive, wipe HDD and install all again. And the things was calmed again... and the errors comes again. And after 2 weeks, I had to do the same. Now my PC works fine, but yesterday I heard a few "clicks" from the HDD.  Now, I remembered this  and I came to Disks and the HDD shows a new value; normally, the problematic number was "pending sectors", always changing, but now, in "irrecoverable sectors", the number is different of zero.  I never had "reallocated sectors". Now, neither. And now, while I write this lines, I've 5 "pending s." and 9 "irrecoverable s.". If this helps, the "read error rate" is 42, 5 for "write error rate".      Very well!! While I was writing "write error rate", I heard 2   clicks. And while writing this, one click more.   And 123 "CRC error rate". So, with this information: is my HDD dying? It'll last days or months? I think this problem will kill the disk in a not very far time.  The drive is a Western Digital Green 1TB-WDC WD10EARS-00Y5B1 (80.00A80) S.N.: WD-WCAV5J301610  PS: When I boot with CTRL+D, many times the system is in "RO mode"; I can't save/download files, Unity doesn't find apps when I write their name {click again, now, while I write the text} and, after a few hours, a crash like the lines above
43401
With many new hard drive disks the physical sector size is 4096. Would it be possible to make the system use a logical sector size of the same size, rather than the default logical sector size of 512?  Will it speed up bulk reads and writes? Where can it be configured?
116352
I read somewhere that smaller (in terms of disk space) hard drives are faster than equivalent but bigger hard drives. How true is this? In other words, say I have two hard drives. Both are of the exact same brand and specs, but one is an 80GB while the other is 500GB. Which would be faster? Or does storage capacity not have any effect on speed at all?
96311
Yeah, so I have 2 hard drives, on with 2 partitions(backups and windows), and I have another that also has 2 partitions with only one used. I have Ubuntu on hard drive 2:partition one, but I have come to a point when the /home folder can't hold any more files, but the partition is only about 15% filled up. So I did some researching and figured out that you can put it on a separate partition, but most of the guides were vague on what I needed to do. Could someone give me step-by-step instructions on what I need to do, or even tell me a, easier or different way to fix this /home folder capacity problem?