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 ...
Time Twin's user avatar
  • 1,946
107 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 ...
harrymc's user avatar
  • 479k
86 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 "...
Bob's user avatar
  • 61.6k
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 ...
Schwern's user avatar
  • 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 ...
Austin Hemmelgarn's user avatar
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 ...
Mokubai's user avatar
  • 92.6k
60 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 ...
jcbermu's user avatar
  • 17.5k
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 ...
Blindspots's user avatar
  • 2,842
38 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 ...
Laurent's user avatar
  • 1,427
28 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 ...
Dmitry Grigoryev's user avatar
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 ...
Corsair64's user avatar
  • 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 ...
DavidPostill's user avatar
  • 157k
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 ...
Overmind's user avatar
  • 10.1k
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. ...
Carrein's user avatar
  • 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. ...
harrymc's user avatar
  • 479k
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] ...
kRush's user avatar
  • 446
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 ...
harrymc's user avatar
  • 479k
19 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 ...
Mokubai's user avatar
  • 92.6k
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 ...
bwDraco's user avatar
  • 46.1k
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 ...
Tom Yan's user avatar
  • 9,633
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 (...
user's user avatar
  • 29.9k
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.
djsmiley2kStaysInside's user avatar
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 ...
gaborous's user avatar
  • 2,003
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, ...
LPChip's user avatar
  • 61.1k
13 votes

Can an SD-XC card have ≤32 GB and still be standards compliant?

The SD association states that an SDXC card has more than 32GB capacity on their website: SDcard.org This seems to indicate that a smaller card isn't an SDXC card. Of course, the change from SD to ...
AdmiralFreebee's user avatar
13 votes
Accepted

Can an SD-XC card have ≤32 GB and still be standards compliant?

Yes, technically There are three separate things conflated here: The protocol (the SD Physical Layer specification that applies - now up to v6.0) implemented by the SD to NAND flash controller chip ...
user1908704's user avatar
12 votes
Accepted

Why you can't just "dd" CD Audio like an ordinary data CD?

Audio CDs (also called CD-DA, specified in the proprietary Red Book) are the oldest format of the CD. The format is inspired by the audio record, so you have a spiral track with continuous data, and ...
dirkt's user avatar
  • 16.9k
12 votes

Is it possible to use a NAS to host videos?

The rough, practical short answer is "Yes but" . The long answer is a bit more complex. A NAS does just what the name implies "Network Attached Storage" - ie its just a store of ...
davidgo's user avatar
  • 70.6k
11 votes
Accepted

Lifespan of an SSD (NAND Flash) for minimal write use archive purposes: Write once, toss in (proverbial or literal) storage closet

SSD technology is rapidly evolving and SSDs have not been around long enough for reliable statistics. I have dug around and found information that indicates that SSD is not reliable as long-term shelf ...
harrymc's user avatar
  • 479k

Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible