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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.

2459 questions
49
votes
23 answers

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
  • 1,839
27
votes
14 answers

Fastest, surest way to erase a hard drive?

I'm looking for a quick, simple, and effective way to erase the hard drives of computers that my company will be getting rid of (donation to charity, most likely). Ideally, I would like a single-purpose bootable utility CD that upon booting, finds…
Mike C.
  • 447
18
votes
3 answers

Acronyms in HDD specification

I wonder about acronyms in specification of Seagate Exos 7E8 8TB SAS (ST8000NM0075) and Seagate Exos X10 10TB SAS (ST10000NM0096) disks. In Performance part I can see: Random Read/Write 4K QD16 WCD (IOPS) - Can you please tell me what's "4K QD16…
Alda
  • 193
11
votes
4 answers

Is there a reliability difference between 2.5" and 3.5" HDDs?

I know there are a couple of key characteristics that determine the reliability of HDDs, but is there a difference between 2.5" and 3.5" drives? In the past I've always assumed that 3.5" drives were likely to be more robust...but I am now…
Stu Thompson
  • 3,379
8
votes
3 answers

failed command: WRITE FPDMA QUEUED - cause of server running slow?

A headless Linux NFS fileserver has been running slow for the last couple days (based on subjective reports from users). I checked journalctl did not see any relevant errors. However, when I connected a monitor, I was greeted by a screen full of…
MountainX
  • 701
7
votes
2 answers

How do I get hard disks to spin down?

I am going to build a server for backups. I want to install the operating system on USB flash disk (a little space), and attach some hard disks for data (much more space needed). Because it is going to be backup, disks will run only once a day. So…
amorfis
  • 757
7
votes
4 answers

Disable Caviar Green drives spinning down

A few months ago I build a 1u server to go into a colo facility. Not knowing any better, I used WD Caviar Green drives. My users have been complaining that the system can be a little slow off the mark, and smartctl shows a very high…
Paul Tomblin
  • 5,235
6
votes
3 answers

Hard Drives: Always on or spin up/down as needed?

The specific application is a NAS that hosts media content and is frequently accessed during the day. My NAS was probably cycling on and off around 5 times a day so I decided to not allow it to spin down. I'm thinking this will be better for the…
Jeff Camera
  • 213
5
votes
2 answers

How do you repair a damaged or corrupt partition?

I have a user with an external hard drive that is no longer recognised: the drive letter does not appear in My Computer. The drive is a Western Digital My Book Essential Edition (WD2500C032) With help from the troubleshooting guide on the WD…
Charles Roper
  • 459
5
votes
6 answers

Securing a single HDD from a retired RAID 5 array

I want to sell two hard drives. Both have been used in a software RAID5 with a logical volume manager. I want to delete all data in order to sell them. But on the devices are no partitions. Is it necessary to clean the drives? Are there any data…
Georg Leber
  • 185
4
votes
2 answers

How to deal with bad sectors?

Bad sectors will eventually occur, but how should I deal with them? If a bad sector occurs, does that mean that the data in that sector is irrecoverably lost, and I should restore it from backup? Is there any way to automate finding out which file…
Hongli Lai
  • 2,262
4
votes
0 answers

Setting the queue length on HP p410(i) controllers

The guys responsible for the DB performance tuning asked me to change the queue depth on the two HP p410(i) controllers of my DL380 G6 server. They want me to switch it from automatic to 64. Unfortunately, I can't find a way to do it. I've tried to…
Stephane
  • 6,452
3
votes
1 answer

Is there an equivalent of WDIDLE3 / idle3 tools for Samsung or Seagate drives?

I have 4x Samsung ST2000LM003 drives, 2TB 2.5". They are behaving like what I read WD Greens behave like, i.e. if any power management is enabled then they park heads and spin down after 8 seconds of inactivity. I'd like to increase this timer. With…
Adam
  • 605
3
votes
1 answer

Does unmounting a hard drive extend its life?

I have a couple of home made (non enterprise) servers with backup HDDs installed on them. Since the purpose of these HDDs is only to store backups, I only use them at the time of performing the backups themselves, so is it a good practice to unmount…
ibai
  • 153
3
votes
3 answers

Does hard drive do read verification at the same time it writes data?

As we all know, modern hard disk drives do internal bad sector management inside their firmware, that is, when the drive detects a physically damanged or unreliable physical sector, it replaces the bad one with a good one from the reserved sector…
Jimm Chen
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