Questions about hard disks' performance, issues, tips, and software.
105
votes
4answers
5k views
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 ...
70
votes
15answers
7k views
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.
64
votes
2answers
6k views
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?
...
47
votes
8answers
3k views
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 ...
41
votes
6answers
17k views
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 ...
39
votes
3answers
44k views
What are the merits of SAS vs SATA drives?
What are the merits of buying SAS drives over SATA drives, or vice versa?
34
votes
22answers
6k views
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 ...
27
votes
9answers
21k views
Reliability of ssd drives
The main advantage of SSD drives is better performance. I am interested in their reliability.
Are SSD drives more reliable then normal hard drives? Some people say they must be because they have no ...
25
votes
14answers
7k views
Is it safe to store data on a hard drive for a long time?
Is it safe to backup data to a hard drive and then leave it for a number of years?
Assuming the file system format can still be read, is this a safe thing to do. Or is it better to continually ...
24
votes
9answers
5k views
How should I burn in hard drives?
Google did a very thorough study on hard drive failures which found that a significant portion of hard drives fail within the first 3 months of heavy usage.
My coworkers and I are thinking we could ...
22
votes
6answers
2k views
Scaling databases with cheap SSD hard drives
I hope that many of you are working with high traffic database-driven websites, and chances are that your main scalability issues are in the database. I noticed a couple of things lately:
Most large ...
21
votes
6answers
27k views
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) ...
20
votes
4answers
986 views
Do raid controllers syncronize HDD platter rotation?
I'm in the market for a new storage solution. While researching various specs one of my coworkers said that some raid controllers can synchronize HDD rotation to the effect of all drives' sector/block ...
20
votes
8answers
1k views
How do I protect business critical data against fire?
We have 72 hard drives that contain our webcast inventory. The number is increasing. We're located in a frame building and we are afraid of not only fire, but catastrophic fire.
I've priced fireproof ...
20
votes
13answers
14k views
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 ...
20
votes
13answers
2k views
High Failure Rate of Large Drives?
I recently deployed a server with 5x 1TB drives (I won't mention their brand, but it was one of the big two). I was initially warned against getting large capacity drives, as a friend advised me that ...
18
votes
4answers
21k views
Intro to Laptop Hard Drives
I've had my first notebook hard drive death (well, actually, it's currently dying... clicking noises, super slow windows boot up ...)
Anyway, I now I realize I don't know anything about laptop hard ...
18
votes
11answers
7k views
Does an unplugged hard drive used for data archival deteriorate?
If I were to archive data on a hard drive, unplug it, and set it on a (not dusty, temperature-controlled) shelf somewhere, would that drive deteriorate much?
How does the data retention of an ...
17
votes
4answers
4k views
Is a hard drive's serial number globally unique?
On Linux I can use smartctl to get a hard drive's vendor, model, firmware revision and serial number:
# smartctl -a /dev/sdb
smartctl 5.40 2010-07-12 r3124 [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu] (local build)
...
16
votes
3answers
453 views
Replacing Hard Drives [closed]
I was wondering if it is a good idea to replace a hard drive in a (fairly) system-critical database server after a certain number of years of use, before it dies.
For example, I was thinking of ...
16
votes
3answers
704 views
SSD head / cylinder / cluster details
A customer of ours makes industrial robots that run on very old, but stable, hardware and software. The only bottleneck has always been the hard drive in these moving machines. Due to constant ...
16
votes
10answers
20k views
What brand(s) of hard disk has the lowest failure rates? [closed]
Wiki for information on which storage manufacturer(s)'s drives have the longest life / lowest failure rate?
Everyone has a favorite, but if you can refer to a (hopefully recent and somewhat ...
16
votes
2answers
2k views
RAID-6: better to replace two dead drives at the same time, or one at a time?
We have a 16-drive RAID-6 that has three problem drives. Two are already dead, and the third is giving SMART warnings. (Nevermind how it got in such a bad state.)
Obviously we want to replace the ...
16
votes
1answer
498 views
Why does unpartitioned Hitachi HDS5C3020 drive start consuming 50% more power 15 minutes after boot?
In a Debian 6.0.6 system there are 74 pieces of 2TB Toshiba DT01ABA200 drives. These drives are identified as Hitachi HDS5C3020BLE630 drives running firmware revision MZ4OAAB0. 64 Drives attached via ...
15
votes
14answers
5k views
How can I destroy data on a failed hard disk without voiding warranty?
Suppose I have a hard disk with data I don't want to expose to a third party. The warranty period for that disk still lasts. Now the disk starts malfunctioning.
I can't use a disk wiping program on a ...
15
votes
6answers
3k views
What's the effect of standby (spindown) mode on modern hard drives?
I just assembled a new Linux file server with several Samsung HD103UJ 1TB hard drives and I am currently optimizing it.
The question I can't find an answer to is: is it reasonable to set a spindown ...
14
votes
8answers
2k views
Zeroing SSD drives
We host VPSes for customers. Each customer VPS is given an LVM LV on a standard spindle hard disk. If the customer were to leave, we zero out this LV ensuring that their data does not leak over to ...
13
votes
7answers
507k views
How to format as FAT32 from Windows 7/Vista
What is the best way to format a USB drive with FAT32 (for Mac compatibility) from within Windows 7/Vista?
I ask because the Disk Management only lets you pick exFAT (because the disk is over 32GB I ...
13
votes
3answers
1k views
Economical way to get many harddrives into rack mount?
Please bear with me as being a bit of a newcomer at 19" rack-mounted equipment.
I've thought a fair bit lately about the best way of getting 4x or 6x of 2.5" hard drives into my rack and are ...
13
votes
5answers
19k views
Virtualbox booting from a real drive?
I'm about to take the plunge and install Win7 RC1 on my desktop machine. However I want to preserve access to my old HDD with XP on it. I don't really want to use full dual-boot since that would ...
12
votes
13answers
825 views
Hard drive fail - How to regain confidence on the drive or make some use of it
After a hard drive fail (lots of corrupted sectors) I reformat it, but the drive give me no confidence to use it in production.
Is there a tool to stress test so I know I can use it?
In which ways ...
12
votes
5answers
667 views
Linux: How to see live numbers of bytes/second transferred to/from hard drive?
I want to see something for Linux similar to the Perfmon program under Windows.
Does such a thing exist that is terminal friendly and not a gui program?
Thanks.
12
votes
4answers
605 views
Hooking up many different external HDs simultaneously
I need a large amount of external storage for an upcoming project. I'm planning on purchasing 10 2TB external drives. I need them all hooked up to a single machine at the same time. What issues ...
12
votes
3answers
645 views
Is S.M.A.R.T. smart to use?
A few years ago I was told to avoid S.M.A.R.T. like the plague. The reasoning was that the stress the testing puts on the drive will actually cause it to fail.
Is this still the case? If not, what is ...
11
votes
5answers
502 views
Is it bad to have a very full hard drive on a high traffic database server?
Running an Ubuntu server with MySQL for a high traffic production database server. Nothing else is running on the machine except the MySQL instance.
We store daily database backups on the DB server, ...
11
votes
4answers
460 views
Should you still spread a hard drive order over several vendors?
Once upon a time, I was taught to spread drive orders for at least around six disks or so to at least two vendors, three vendors if there are more than 20 disks. Use the same make and model of disk, ...
11
votes
2answers
5k views
How to determine the best byte size for the dd command
I know that doing a dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb does a deep hard drive copy. I've heard that people have been able to speed up the process by increasing the number of bytes that are read and written at ...
11
votes
2answers
3k views
Are RDX removable disks a good replacement for LTO tape?
Over a period of three weeks, I experienced six complete failures of LTO-1 and LTO-2 tape drives at client sites. Some had failed mechanisms. Others lost the ability to write reliably. These were HP ...
10
votes
7answers
2k views
How many SMART sector reallocations indicate problems?
I have a NAS appliance that is just over a month old. It is configured to email me alerts generated from the hard drives' SMART data. After one day, one of the hard drives reported that a sector had ...
10
votes
4answers
1k views
Why HDD rotate at 7200 rpm?
I was wondering why hard drives rotate at these specific speed (5400,7200, ...) and not other values.
10
votes
9answers
29k views
How can I increase the size of a Windows 2003 NTFS partition?
I have a very important server running Windows Server 2003 and my System partition is becoming too small, it's slowing down the machine.
I have already tried all the cleaning stuff and transferring ...
10
votes
7answers
2k views
Does it make sense to install SSDs on server?
I want to build a server hosting about 2TB+ data. Of course SSD is out of the picture in terms of the data drive. My question is: Is there any benefit to use SSDs as the boot drive? I plan to put 16G ...
9
votes
8answers
9k views
How can I mount a hard drive as read-only on Windows XP?
I recently had reason to move a hard drive from a computer that blew up to another computer for the purpose of recovering data. Under the (unfortunate) circumstances, both the donor and the recipient ...
9
votes
4answers
1k views
What effects do magnets have on HDDs and SSDs? [closed]
What do magnets do to hard disk drives and solid state drives upon contact?
9
votes
10answers
644 views
Is there a reason to change a server's hard drive before it faults?
Just a quick question: is there a reason to change a server's hard drive after x years before it faults (it eventually will at some point) or should I just leave it until it faults? I have little ...
9
votes
8answers
5k views
Physically Identify the failed hard drive
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 ...
9
votes
2answers
3k views
9
votes
7answers
11k views
Convert a hard-drive into a VMWare machine
I have a hard-drive from a dead server, and I would like to convert it to a virtual machine. (original system OS is windows 2003)
I know VMWare converter can convert a physical machine to a VMWare ...
9
votes
3answers
463 views
Do I need to defrag MacOSX filesystems?
The equivalent linux question reminded me of the bad performance of my MacBookPro. I'm not even sure what the default FS nowadays is. I read somewhere that there is a cron job which runs on friday or ...
9
votes
5answers
63k views
Can you use a USB hard drive in ESXI?
I know that you can install ESXi 4.0 on a thumbdrive, but I was wondering if you could plug in an external harddrive to give extra storage to one of your VMs? We run a fileserver inside of ESXi that ...
