Are all basic SATA drives equally reliable?
Question: I’m about to purchase a SATA hard drive. I was wondering if, aside from the storage capacity, are there any other factors I should keep in mind? I care…
How can I resolve the error “MediaKit reports partition (map) too small”?
Question: I am unable to expand my Mac’s hard disk. diskutility reports this error: ? MediaKit reports partition (map) too small How can I resolve this? Answer: If you start…
Why does a SATA hard drive have jumpers?
Question: Back in the days of PATA hard drives, a person used jumpers on the drive to indicate whether the drive was the master or the slave of the channel,…
Is it faster to have two smaller hard drives or one big one?
Question: Assuming that the drives all have the same RPM and overall same specs except for storage space, would it be faster to install two hard drives together or just…
How to make smartd shut up about one particular offline uncorrectable sector?
Question: I have a disk in a two-disk software RAID-1 for which recently an “offline uncorrectable sector” appeared in the SMART status. 198 Offline_Uncorrectable ?0x0030 ?200 ?200 ?000 ?Old_age ?Offline…
How can I enable AHCI on a SATA drive after installing Windows?
Question: Can I enable AHCI after installing Windows 7 in a SATA drive that was on IDE mode? Answer: You need to make the msahci and/or IastorV drivers be loaded…
How to check if my eSATAp port provides 12V power?
Question: I have a Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 13″ model 0217-2QG with eSATAp port. How do i check if my port provides 12V power (enough to power a 3.5″ HDD)? Answer:…
Soldering a SATA-Data cable to a HDD
Question: I tried to clean my computer and accidentally ripped of the SATA cable from the HDD which resulted in a broken SATA data port because the “L” on the…
Check health of eMMC
Question: How can I check the health of eMMC with linux? It seems that smartctl can’t handle it: root@om:~# smartctl -a /dev/mmcblk0smartctl 6.5 2016-01-24 r4214 (local build)Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce…
Force spin-down of external hard-drive on linux (raspberry pi)
Question: I’m currently setting up a home-server using a Raspberry Pi with an external hard-disk connected via usb.However, my hard-drive will never spin down when being idle. I tried already…