When a disk read or disk write occurs, where does the data go?
Question: I understand that there is such a thing as a disk controller which contains a buffer, but was wondering if the CPU reads directly from this buffer, or whether…
How does a hard drive retain information after being formatted?
Question: Companies try to zero-fill their hard drives several times when they decommission them, why? Surely one pass of zero-fill would do the job exactly as they need. I understand…
Imaging new hard drive in Windows 7 laptop?
Question: I’m upgrading my Windows 7 laptop to a new hard drive. How can I clone or image the old hard drive over to the new hard drive, so that…
Is my hard drive dying?
Question: Im gettings strange error messages in the terminal. This is the output of dmesg: ata4.00: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x78 SErr 0x400000 action 0x6 frozen ata4.00: irq_stat 0x08000000, interface…
Newly formatted (NTFS) external hard drive already has ‘Used space’. What determines the used space’s amount? Is it correlated to the HD’s capacity?
Question: I just bought a new external hard drive (WD Elements – 1 TB). In a PC with Windows 7, I formatted it by Right-clicking the drive > Format (Quick…
Is it ok to use Bittorrent on solid state drives (SSD)?
Question: I heard it’s not recommended because of all the writing on the drive? (My friend wants to know) Answer: You don’t download bittorrent data at SSD speeds (usually). ?Why…
How to find out what disk drives are installed in a Ubuntu server
Question: I have remote access (including root access) to a Ubuntu 9 server, but can’t inspect it physically or reboot it. I want to find out the manufacturer and model…
What is a bare or OEM hard drive?
Question: I am looking for a new internal hard drive for laptop and found the terms like Bare drive and OEM drive. I searched the net and found that bare…
Read/WRITE/Verify disk diagnostic tool for Mac OS X?
Question: It seems that there are many tools out there for Mac OS X that test a hard drive for bad blocks by doing a Read/Verify pass. That is, they…
LBA and sector size
Question: Does LBA always specify sectors as 512?bytes even if the drive is formatted with 4K?sectors? Because I read that you should format the partition boundaries so that the 4K?clusters…