Category: Questions

Question: I have a bunch of directories backed up on an external HDD – not an SSD, a magnetic disk. The backup is just onto a single disk (yes, I…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 =…

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…

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…

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…

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…