Clone only space in use from hard disk
Question: Can I use dd, rsync, clonezilla or any tool to clone only space in use in my hard disk in Linux? I need to do a backup from a…
How to prolong the life of an external hard drive?
Question: In ten years, across several different machines, different companies, and different operating systems I’ve noticed a trend that external hard drives die long before their internal counterparts. Everyone I’ve…
Why is gzip slow despite CPU and hard drive performance not being maxed out?
Question: I have some JSON files, 20 GB each, that I want to compress with gzip: gzip file1.json This takes up one full CPU core, all fine. It processes around…
Is it safe to resize Windows partition with GParted?
Question: Is there any chance that my Windows will fail to load after resizing its partition? I remember ~4 years ago i wanted to install Ubuntu as second system on…
What’s the point of hard drives reporting their physical sector size?
Question: I have an SSD that can be configured to report its physical sector size to an OS in two different ways: Option 1: Logical = 512 Bytes, Physical =…
Does low disk space affect SSD performance?
Question: I was wondering if having less than 5-10GB of free space on an SSD would affect performance. Is it specific to SSD or is it more of an operating…
How can I determine the sector size on an external hard drive?
Question: Hard drives are transitioning from 512 byte to 4096 byte sector sizes, and it looks like Windows XP won’t support these newer drives without additional software (such as WDalign…
badblocks vs. SMART Extended Self Test
Question: How does a full read/write surface scan by ‘badblocks’ differ from the built in SMART Extended self test? It seems like they are both full surface scans, so why…
Why create many partitions?
Question: I have noticed that when installing Ubuntu some people create multiple partitions for directories. Like one for root, one for home, one for boot. What is the advantage to…
How to assign permanent drive letters to removable USB hard drives
Question: I have scripts that expect specific drive letters for hard drives. Windows sometimes assigns the different drive letters (e.g. I expected my Maxtor drive to be E:, but it’s…