158
votes
Accepted
Disadvantages of partitioning an SSD?
SSDs do not, I repeat, do NOT work at the filesystem level!
There is no 1:1 correlation between how the filesystem sees things and how the SSD sees things.
Feel free to partition the SSD any way you ...
- 1,946
106
votes
What's faster? Moving files from one drive to another, or moving files in the same drive?
Moving a file inside the same partition (or same file-system) won't really move anything.
All it would do would be to delete its entry in the file-table
and create another. The file itself will not be ...
- 465k
87
votes
Why is my HDD so slow on the "4K" speed tests?
What you are running into is typical of mechanical HDDs, and one of the major benefits of SSDs: HDDs have terrible random access performance.
In CrystalDiskMark, "Seq" means sequential access while "...
- 61.3k
69
votes
Accepted
How much slower do SSDs get as they fill up or age?
As Bob mentioned in the comments, a lot has changed about SSDs in recent years. There's a few key technologies which fixed early performance issues. The tl;dr is don't worry about it, buy an SSD, the ...
- 2,196
68
votes
What's faster? Moving files from one drive to another, or moving files in the same drive?
It depends on a bit more than just the physical hardware layout. In general, there are four cases to consider:
Moving a file within a single filesystem (IOW, within a single ‘drive’ by the Windows ...
- 9,288
67
votes
Accepted
How can a hard drive provide a host device with file/directory listings when the drive isn't spinning?
Caching.
Both the operating system and drive have caches that buffer recently used drive data. If data is in the cache then it does not need to go direct to the disk platter.
Directory listing data ...
- 90.8k
59
votes
Confusion with storage capacity (powers of 10 and 2)
The historical reason of using powers of 2 is that memory and hard disk are accessed by the CPU using an address space composed of lines on binary code. Hardware producers decided the names in this ...
- 17.4k
54
votes
Accepted
How can Windows 10 function on as little as 32 GB of disk space?
Windows 10 uses CompactOS, which compresses Windows files, to make them smaller:
Compact OS Compact OS installs the operating system files as compressed files. Compact OS is supported on both UEFI-...
- 97.7k
52
votes
Accepted
Hard drive clicking for 16 times during startup
Backup. Backup. Backup.
(Just to be sure you hear me).
According with datacent [1] this is the sound of a Toshiba laptop drive with bad heads making clicking or sweeping sound on boot up. [s2]. ...
- 18.9k
40
votes
Accepted
Cannot `cd` to E: drive using Windows CMD command line
Using cd/chdir you cannot change the current working directory (CWD) to one on a different drive unless first switching drives (2 steps) or including the /d switch as part of your command (1 step).
cd ...
- 2,735
35
votes
Why should I use exFAT over NTFS on removable media?
NTFS has journaling which helps ensure the file system can recover from corruption, whereas exFAT does not. So if you use the drive only from Windows PCs and reliability and data integrity are ...
- 1,397
27
votes
Accepted
Are M-disks truly more reliable than other forms of storage?
A theoretical lifespan of 1000 years is actually not that big. Factory-produced CD-ROMs which were replicated from a master-disk are expected to last for 100 years or more, but of course you cannot ...
- 9,211
27
votes
How much slower do SSDs get as they fill up or age?
Unless you plan on moving terabytes of data at a time, the impact would be negligible. Even at queue depth 32, which you would never see unless you are a workstation or sever user, the effects only ...
- 373
24
votes
How is a NAS different from a SAN?
Isn't a NAS basically just a small SAN?
Summary:
A NAS is a single server usually connected by Ethernet to a LAN, and usually provides file level access
A SAN usually provides block level access, t
...
- 155k
23
votes
Confusion with storage capacity (powers of 10 and 2)
In short: it was all about marketing.
jcbermu explained well, but I don't agree to the reasons behind all of that.
While any informatics system uses the binary system, the bits & bytes are ...
- 9,980
21
votes
Hard drive clicking for 16 times during startup
Clicking indicates a mechanical problem with the drive, or a faulty platter where the heads cannot align properly. They are seeking to the limit defined by the drive's firmware. The drive is defective;...
- 6,448
21
votes
Accepted
Can you just "pull the plug" on MTP devices?
When you plug in a USB mass storage device, it gives the host computer undifferentiated access to the mass storage.
It assumes absolute control over the file system similar to that of a hard drive.
...
- 1,532
21
votes
Accepted
Sink directory like /dev/null
The post
How can I create a /dev/null-like "blackhole" directory?
suggests this :
This isn't supported out-of-the-box on any unix I know, but you can do pretty much anything with FUSE. ...
- 465k
20
votes
Immediately spin down a HDD on Windows
Since you are familiar with Linux, stick to the smartctl command-line utility of smartmontools. You can spin down disks with the -s switch.
From the man page:
-s NAME[,VALUE], --set=NAME[,VALUE]
...
- 446
20
votes
Space issues on 32 GB Windows 10 mini PC
The Windows feature updates will consume approximately 3-5GB once ready to install, but the download of the feature update itself is done via Windows update and can consume a lot more in preparation ...
- 90.8k
19
votes
Disadvantages of partitioning an SSD?
Very long answers here, when the answer is simple enough and follows
directly just from the general knowledge of SSDs.
One does not need more than read
the Wikipedia term of Solid-state drive to ...
- 465k
17
votes
Accepted
Expand a Linux MD RAID 10 array to use larger disks
Complete the following steps for each disk; replace /dev/sda1 with other disks as necessary. You must complete all of these steps for one disk before you can proceed to the next disk.
Mark the disk ...
- 46k
16
votes
Will FreeNAS/ZFS let me manage my storage this way
First off: I'm not going to speculate about development 6-7 years into the future. This is about today, and the nearest future. For the TL;DR, see the bottom of this answer.
ZFS today does not allow ...
- 29.6k
16
votes
How can Windows 10 function on as little as 32 GB of disk space?
I'm not sure what you have on your laptop but a clean Win 7 install is usually about 12GB's and Windows 10 is spec'd at 16GB's for 32 bit and 20GB's for 64 bit. All that extra on yours might be ...
- 2,687
16
votes
Accepted
Why does my 500GB hard drive have a capacity of exactly 500,107,862,016 bytes?
The answer is IDEMA formula, as described in the IDEMA Standard LBA 1-03 specification (specs available here, or direct PDF download).
LBA counts = (97,696,368) + (1,953,504 * (Advertised Capacity in ...
- 9,563
16
votes
Confusion with storage capacity (powers of 10 and 2)
jcbermu's answer is good, but I want to approach this from a different angle.
1GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes (powers of 10) and 1,073,741,824 bytes (powers of 2), then: it shows less storage capacity (...
- 29.6k
16
votes
Accepted
How can I make a hard drive copy its contents to another hard drive in real time?
Raid mirroring of the drives (RAID 1) would accomplish this easily, there are other ways however I'm not familiar enough with them to attempt to explain how to manage it.
- 6,683
14
votes
What medium should be used for long term, high volume, data storage (archival)?
Quick follow-up on my previous answer above, this will be made more concise and extended with additional (but not of primary importance) information and references that I cannot add in the first ...
- 1,923
14
votes
How can I make a hard drive copy its contents to another hard drive in real time?
If you use Windows 2000 or up, you can create 1 mirrored partition that spans 2 or more drives, where data written to this one partition is stored on those disks simultaneously.
In order to do this, ...
- 60k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible