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Questions tagged [hard-disk]

A permanent data storage device used for storing and retrieving digital information using rapidly rotating discs (platters) coated with magnetic material in a rigid form factor (as opposed to floppy disks).

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How to know if a disk is an SSD or an HDD

I want to know whether a disk is a solid-state drive or hard disk. lshw is not installed. I do yum install lshw and it says there is no package named lshw. I do not know which version of http://pkgs.repoforge.org/lshw/ is suitable for my CentOS. I…
user4951
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How do I find out what hard disks are in the system?

I need to know what hard disks are available, including ones that aren't mounted and possibly aren't formatted. I can't find them in dmesg or /var/log/messages (too much to scroll through). I'm hoping there's a way to use /dev or /proc to find out…
xenoterracide
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How to list disks, partitions and filesystems in Linux?

In Windows, if you type LIST DISK using DiskPart in a command prompt it lists all physical storage devices, plus their size, format, etc. What is the equivalent of this in Linux?
Mia
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How do I know if dd is still working?

I've not used dd all that much, but so far it's not failed me yet. Right now, I've had a dd going for over 12 hours - I'm writing an image back to the disk it came from - and I'm getting a little worried, as I was able to dd from the disk to the…
eckza
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GPT or MBR: How do I know?

How can I tell whether my harddrive is laid out using an MBR or GPT format?
goldilocks
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How to dd a remote disk using SSH on local machine and save to a local disk

How can I create a backup of a remote disk using SSH on my local machine and save it to a local disk? I've tried the following: ssh [email protected] "sudo dd if=/dev/sdX " | \ dd of=/home/username/Documents/filename.image` However, I…
Qu0rk
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Harddisk serial number from terminal?

I have multiple hard disks which get connected to my server and I'm not sure which one is what in the view of sdXY. If I could see the serial numbers of my hard disks from terminal, I could easily identify them. Is there any way I can get the serial…
Raja G
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How to see disk details like manufacturer in Linux

With sfdisk -s I can see the disk capacity as follows: $ sfdisk -s /dev/cciss/c0d0: 143338560 total: 143338560 blocks How do I see disk details like disk manufacturer? I tried hdparm, but got an error: $ hdparm -i …
user3266
75
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6 answers

Differences between volume, partition and drive

What do these terms mean exactly? partition volume drive On Windows, one may say drive C: or partition C:. On Linux I'm not sure what should be used for partitions because they don't have a name.
user44920
75
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6 answers

What NOT to put on an SSD?

I bought an SSD and I am going to set up my desktop system with a completely fresh Linux installation. SSDs are known to be fast, but they have a disadvantage: The number of writes (per block?) is limited. So I am thinking about which data should be…
user41961
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SmartMonTools: How can I know if there is any smartctl test running on my hard disk?

I am testing a hard disk with SmartMonTools. Hard disk status prior to the testings (only one short test performed days ago): $ sudo smartctl -l selftest /dev/sda smartctl 6.2 2013-07-26 r3841 [i686-linux-3.16.0-30-generic] (local build) Copyright…
Sopalajo de Arrierez
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How to find which process is regularly writing to disk?

How can I find which process is constantly writing to disk? I like my workstation to be close to silent and I just build a new system (P8B75-M + Core i5 3450s -- the 's' because it has a lower max TDP) with quiet fans etc. and installed Debian…
Cedric Martin
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Way to instantly fill up/use up lots of disk space?

On a Linux VM I would like to TEST the NAGIOS monitoring more deeply than just switching off the VM or disconnecting the virtual NIC; I would like to test or "enforce a disk space alarm" through occupying several % of free space for a short period…
Axel Werner
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How can I benchmark my HDD?

I've seen commands to benchmark one's HDD such as this using dd: $ time sh -c "dd if=/dev/zero of=ddfile bs=8k count=250000 && sync" Are there better methods to do so than this?
slm
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Full DD copy from hdd to hdd

ORIGINAL QUESTION: If I have 2 identical hard drives with the following characteristics: SATA 6.0 Gb/s 5400 rpm 3TB How long should a full dd copy take to complete? So far it's been running for 5 hours and still going... I am using Linux Ubuntu…
oshirowanen
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