Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with disk

Which SSD drive to buy for fastest seek time?

bottlebrushtree — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:25:13 -0800

Which internal SSD drive to buy for fastest seek time? I use a piece of scientific software which has massive disk based binary database files (>100GB). The application does random seeks into these files looking for a match. It will do millions of seeks, but few long runs of "reads"

I'm looking to buy a SSD drive to speed up this application.

My requirements:
fast seek time
larger than 128GB
commercially available (e.g. I can get it consistently online)
under $1500US, but under $1000 is best
Will be used under Windows

At least for once, I have good backups...

tkolstee — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:46:01 -0800

iMac drives failing - first external, then internal. Seems to be hardware in both cases. Questions about troubleshooting or replacement inside. My 1TB external media drive (usually connected via firewire, but has USB as well) on my iMac went bad last week, randomly dropping off until it's powercycled. It was a WD MyBook, which I have now come to understand has an overheating issue. The firmware upgrade didn't help. I bought a new (1.5TB Seagate USB 2.0) external and migrated over the files using rsync. Opening the external case and pointing a desktop fan at the drive seemed to help it stay up longer, but SEVERAL times during the process it crashed, sometimes hanging the host computer with it. Several forced powercycles and hours later, I had all my data moved. One of these crashes happened in the middle of a Spotlight index job which I tried to kill to no avail.

I was just about to "retire" the old drive when it crashed once more, again hanging the iMac. I held down the power button on the iMac and forcefully rebooted it, and this time the system came up to the "question-mark-within-a-folder" icon. Booted from Snow Leopard install DVD, and tried to run Disk Utility. Disk Utility was having some problems detecting the filesystem/partitions on the internal drive, so I tried to repartition it to restore my Time Machine backup and found that its capacity was listed as 0 bytes.

I've gotten the drive to (briefly) recognize properly once, but most of the time the drive begins clicking as it's trying to read. When it was recognized I attempted a verify and repair, but the drive stopped working (and again hung the computer) in the middle of the process.

Is there any possible correlation (unstable power, magnetic interference, sunspots?) between the external and internal drives failing so closely together? It seems like this is a hardware failure where both drives are concerned; the external due to heat intolerance, and the internal due to unknown causes but making a telltale click. Could the internal drive have failed due to my powercycling the machine? I would think the machine should have brains enough to gracefully kill off its drive before shutting itself off....

Secondly, is there anything else I can do to save the drive? I'm assuming the click generally means the drive won't ever be good again. I know about the freezer trick and other temporary methods, but I don't care about the data on the drive as it's backed up and easily replaceable.

Third, if the internal drive is permanently dead, how easy is it to replace it with a new one? I have a 3.5" 250GB SATA drive that I can use to replace it, but have never taken apart an iMac before.

Lastly, is there anything I can do with the overheating external? It seems to work fine, so long as I direct a lot of airflow at it, but otherwise it crashes within 30-60 minutes of use. It seems to be getting more intolerant of heat as time goes on.

The receipt lists this as an "iMac 17/2.0/1G/160/SD/AP/BT/WLKBM, Part Number MA758LL/A". It was purchased July 29, 2007 so is not still under any warranty.

emergency boot disk for laptop

Wong Fei-hung — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 09:19:46 -0800

Any suggestions on an emergency boot tool that can see my hard drive? My laptop won't boot all the way. Right when I should see three account icons I get an spinning circle and a "please wait" message. Circle and message eventually go away and I am stuck. Toshiba Satellite with Vista Home Premium 32 bit. I have tried booting from Knoppix CD (on USB) and Windows X-PE (on CD) but neither can see my hard drive. Laptop is just over a year old.

Thanks! (The Recovery Disks that Toshiba supplied with my computer are not compatible with it.)

My Maxtor drive (Seagate disk??) won't mount. Where should I send it?

skylar — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 05:05:20 -0800

My Maxtor Basics 1 terabyte external USB 2.0 drive no longer mounts. I have been through all the usual stuff with tech support (including disk management and device management) and I've tried it on multiple computers. Although the green light comes on when it's plugged into USB, apart from that it's not talking to the computer. There has been no strange noise, clicking, smoke or smell. Maxtor tech support say it's a failed drive. A data recovery company I phoned said it's probably damaged firmware but the data on the disk is probably safe. I'm nervous about sending it to a data recovery company because I seem to be looking at about GBP £179 minimum or maybe many, many hundreds more. Is it likely to be a matter of simply soldering something here or replacing something there, ie a job that I could take to a local geek? Or should I be looking to take this to a major data recovery centre? I'm in London, UK.

Hard Drive Recoverable?

jules1651 — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:48:53 -0800

I just pulled an older computer out of the closet to donate, and yesterday it booted up fine. Today, I get an error stating "A disk read error occured, press CTL ALT DEL to reboot." I used UBCD for Windows and I cannot see the hard drive when I boot from there either. What other avenues should I explore to try and fix the disk, or is it toast and the files unrecoverable? I am willing to open it up. Thanks in advance. Info on the computer:

Dell Dimension 2400
Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHz processor
Chipset: Intel 845GV chipset
Memory: 256MB PC-2700 DDR memory (one module)
Networking: Integrated 10/100 Ethernet
Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 40GB ATA/100 7200RPM hard drive
CDROM: Hitachi 48X CD-ROM drive
BIOS: A05

Fix disk drive error or pay for data recovery?

dios — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:09:11 -0800

Computer has "disk read error press ctrl + alt + delete" problem. I would like to get the data off it, and put it on a new computer. Is this something I can get fixed and then get the data off of it? Or do I need to pay out the nose for a data recovery person? So windows xp computer says "disk read error press ctrl + alt + delete." Do it, and you go back to the same error screen.

I'm a computer idiot. I know nothing about them mechanically. I would like the data off the computer (photos, documents). The data was all on the d: drive (my idiot's understanding is that I had one drive that was partitioned into a c: and d: drive).

So, I don't know if that is even something that can be fixed. But I checked with a reputable data recovery place.

They did a free initial screening of the drive. This is what they responded with:

"Your drive has sustained mechanical failure and requires clean room work and proprietary procedures in order to bypass the damage and recover your data.
Your drive has sustained mechanical failure to internal parts within the drive.
The media is in working conditions, but may have intermittent problems and is suggested to be replaced.
Drive clicks 3 times and then stops, and won't ID"

Cost of recovery: $1,600.

Now, I'd like the data off there. I don't know if I want it bad enough for $1,600.

My question is this: from that can anyone tell what is wrong with the computer, and if so, whether it is something that can be fixed to get the data? I'm planning on throwing away the whole thing and getting a new computer; I just want the data at this point. But I'd rather find a cheaper route than paying the $1600 for the data recovery. So maybe fix the drive and get the data myself? Or is $1600 a reasonable price to pay to get the data given the skill required to retrieve it, or can I likely find a cheaper place for this?

Disk Utility error: false alarm, or bad omen?

so_necessary — Sat, 02 May 2009 16:26:36 -0800

In OS X on my iMac, Disk Utility asserts that my main, internal hard drive is "about to fail" and has been asserting this for several months. But my computer is running just fine... should I worry? The S.M.A.R.T status is failed, and the various helpful sounding options, like First Aid or Verify, are all unclickably greyed out. Using Boot Camp and HD Tune under windows, I can see the "bad" attribute is:

ID (01) Raw Read Error Rate
Current: 11
Worst: 1
Threshold: 51
Data: 59669
Status: Failed

A different utility just names the fields slightly differently...

1, Raw Read Error Rate
Raw value: 59699
Status: FAIL
Value: 11
Worst: 1
Threshold: 51

All the ther attributes (things like "seek error rate" and "spin up time" and stuff) are normal.

But my computer is running just fine. I can't work out if this is just some freaky one-time error that happened to the hard drive once which it won't forget about, reflects an existing (if seemingly benign) state of affairs, or is a sign of impending doom. This error has been present for several months now, perhaps even from The Beginning - the iMac is only 6 - 8 months old. The Man From Apple suggested I format my entire drive but that sounds pretty tedious if I don't really need to do anything / insufficient if my hard drive is actually about to die from mechanical failure.

Obviously I'd love for you all to tell me how I can safely ignore this, and even how I might be able to disabuse Disk Utility of the notion that things are messed up. On the other hand, if you think there might be trouble ahead, then do snap me out of my complacency and I'll promise not to shoot the messenger.

Why does my File Browser keep opening?

carsonb — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 09:49:44 -0800

There are currently 4 File Browsers open on my desktop, all displaying either the contents of my external hard drive or the folder where it's mounted (/media/). I didn't open them—they just showed up. This morning when I woke up there was 40+ File Browser windows open of the same. Another window just opened; it seems to occur at random intervals. I'm running Ubuntu Linux 8.10, wtf is causing this? It's been going on for about a week now. My external drive is a 500gb WD network drive that's been ripped out of its original case, rehoused in a new external enclosure, wiped and repartitioned as ext3, and plugged directly into my desktop. I keep my music collection on it, and about a week ago Amarok totally forgot that I have any music files. I checked the path marked for the collection; Amarok still knows where the files are, and will play them if I drag/drop them from the browser into the playlist, but it doesn't report that I have a collection. Oddly, saved playlists still work.

Then, yesterday, the drive wouldn't even mount. Every time I tried I got an odd error message that didn't turn up many results in the Google. (Hasn't happened today and I don't have the text of the msg saved.) The only concrete suggestion I got from searching was to try testdisk to root out any bad sectors, find missing partitions, etc. So I ran that, didn't really find any problems, but had the program re-write the partition table anyway. The drive mounted after I did that, but has so far continued the original bad behavior.

I've banged on all the relevant keyboard keys; it's not a stuck key. I've unplugged the drive to let it cool down and plugged it back in. I've tried prayer and idol worship and what seems like a million other things. I'm running out of ideas here.

What's going on? (4 more File Browsers have opened in the background while I typed this.) How do I make it stop? Do I have a virus? (My computer is acting like I never expected a Linux desktop to, coming from buggy, virusy Windows.) Is my drive dying? How can I get Amarok to recognize my collection again? Failing relevant answers to the above, what's the easiest way to close a zillion (but not all) windows at once?

What's a good, preferably free, diagnostics program for Windows?

Grinder — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:38:35 -0800

What's a good, preferably free, diagnostics program for Windows? I've been asked to look at a Windows laptop which had a hard disk crash recently. I want to do a low-level disk scan and general test of the electronics, like what Norton Disk Doctor et al for DOS used to do, but don't use Windows much any more and don't know what would be good. Does any one have any suggestions? (Free options preferred.)

Why won't certain DVDs play in my DVD player?

KevinSkomsvold — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 21:20:13 -0800

Our Kia Sedona has one of those built in DVD players, An Audiovox PROV710. For the life of me I can't get DVDs to play in it. In the manual it says:

Types of Discs your DVD will play
• DVD discs – DVDs discs which contain video.
• Audio discs – Audio CDs contain musical or sound content only.
• MP3 discs – A disc that contains audio files (for example, a CD-R with downloaded MP3 files).
Loading and Playing Discs

Before you load a disc, make sure that it is compatible with the player.
Note: the following Discs CANNOT be used with this player :
• MiniDisc
• Laserdisc
• CD-I, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM

So it won't play DVD-ROM disks but it will play DVDs. I'm confused.
Ironically, I found a DVD of "Dawn of The Dead" that was all scratched and popped it in. It started right up.

I took a stack of my daughters CDs and of all of them, only Lion King and Nemo worked like a champ. I can't tell what the difference is between the ones that work and the ones that don't.

Best hard drive practice?

edbyford — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 05:51:48 -0800

Is CHKDSK actually any good? I had a problem a few months ago where my hard drive started corrupting my files. I don't blame chkdsk for this, but when I was trying to sort out how I could recover some of these files, somebody implied that all chkdsk did was mark the sector bad, rather than try and save what is on there. Is this true? If so, isn't it a pretty bad hard disk checker?

Now, my hard drive contains many many photos, music and video files, which I want to make sure don't get corrupted or damaged in any way. What would you recommend I use or do to check my files over and make sure they're ok?

TIA.

Is there a "disk space" analogue to Folding@Home?

philomathoholic — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 14:55:10 -0800

Is there an "extra disk space" analogue to the projects to which one can volunteer their extra bandwidth or computing power? Like, instead of Folding@Home using my processor, is there something that will use my disk space (for a good cause)?

Mac busted?

djgh — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 07:12:21 -0800

Is my Macbook's HD broken? Unable to boot, more details inside. I can't get my Macbook (black, OSX Tiger) to boot. I got the flashing question mark. Booted from the install disk, and Disk Utility and Startup Diak apps were unable to see my internal drive. Reset PRAM, following Apple's online troubleshooting guide, then went back to Disk Utility, which was still unable to see my drive. HD is making funny noises - am I right to assume that this is a hardware failure?

Other relevant info - I recently installed a new battery.

How to Benchmark Read/Write Speeds On My SD Card vs. My Hard Drive?

sidereal — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 20:18:33 -0800

Is there a free and/or clever way to find out if the SD card plugged into my laptop is faster or slower than the laptop hard drive regarding read/write operations? I am running Windows Vista Home Premium. I'm wondering, for example, if the SD card would be a better scratch disk for Photoshop, and other apps that require non-RAM swap/scratch space. (I'm not intending to use ReadyBoost.)

How to twin/synch hard disks in order to avoid crying bad in case of unexpected failure and no fresh backups ready?

lion — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 08:53:35 -0800

Does it exist for consumer use? A storage device made by two (or more) twin synched separate hard disks, one for normal use and the other one for backup just in case something goes wrong? Or a software doing the same thing with two (or more) external hard disks? I would like to know if I can buy a product like the one I'm going to describe.

Premise: I have a laptop, and it uses its internal SATA hard disk.
I have a lot of stuff on it, and I have no time - and never will have - to backup everything, every day, on DVDs, external USB hdd, etc.

I would like to be very unlikely to lose some data (or everything).
I know some day the internal HDD, or the laptop, will fail. It's electronics. There are mech parts. It simply won't last forever, it's normal.

Ok, so: I would like some kind of device, which I could connect to my laptop and see it as a normal hard disk, a storage device.
But, it should be a special one: e.g. it should be composed by at least TWO separate hard disks (but it would be nice to have the possibility of adding as many as I can buy).
Let me call them the "main" and the "backup" disk.

The main disk should be used as I normally do with the internal SATA disk. But, there should be some kind of controller synching whatever changes on the main disk, on the backup disk.

This way, if laptop brokes, I still have all my data on the external disk. And if the main disk fails, I still have everything on the backup one: so I can replace the main with a new hard disk, press a (hardware or software) button, and everything from backup to new main is copied, and they start synching again. Or, if the backup fails, I'll replace the backup disk, press a button, and voila'.
And, if the device controller breaks, I can pick one of the disks and put it in a usb external disk case and continue working as nothing happened (or until I buy a new one of this kind of special device).

I don't know if my explanation is understandable, but I hope you got the idea and you know something similar I can buy.

Another solution, if you know of one, would be a software solution which I should configure for the same business, telling it two (or more) external hard disks I want to use as main and backup devices.

Or, if you can suggest some kind of hacker solution for Windows XP, with rsynch and such things, it would be ok too.

Free software would be appreciated, but eventually if some good commercial solutions exist don't exclude them.

Thanks

Can a drive that is encrypted with software-based full disk encryption be cloned?

Anonymous — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 07:43:47 -0800

Can a drive that is encrypted with software-based full disk encryption be cloned? I have a laptop with a hard drive that is encrypted with software-based full disk encryption (Utimaco SafeGuard Easy), and I want to upgrade to a faster and larger drive. Can the entire drive be cloned without unencrypting the drive? Will I be able to clone to a larger drive? I am not able to remove/modify/reconfigure the encryption software, as it was installed by the IT overlords.

(For extra points, any suggestions for open-source/free cloning software?)

Windows n00b needs help explaining how computer is formed.

Devils Rancher — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 09:49:53 -0800

Windows Illiteracy Filter. Help me help my mother via long-distance to understand the difference between memory and hard disk storage, and how to access information on her Windows XP machine that will tell her how much memory she has, if there are any empty slots, what type of memory her computer requires, and how large her hard drive is, including used/available space stats. I'm a long-time Mac user that could probably find all this given long enough in front of said computer, but she lives 1800 miles away, and I don't know where to tell her to click.

I could also use guidance in how to explain these complexities in pedestrian language, so as to not lose my temper with a person who has a tendency to interrupt, in conversation. I will be handling this via email, so as to be able to complete a sentence. I got utterly frustrated with her on the phone the other day trying to explain the difference, as I wanted to send her some files, but she said she didn't have enough memory to store them. I tried to explain the difference between memory and storage, but got interrupted to the point where I gave up. Today I get an email from her telling me her computer "has 3 mb of memory."

Hope me.

How do I track my DVD-Rs?

tommorris — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:18:20 -0800

Is there any good, free UNIX/Linux software you can suggest for keeping a searchable index of removable media? I have a large collection of backed up files on DVD-R (about five or six hundred volumes). I have been using a proprietary and rather crufty application called CDFinder. My Mac laptop has become rather less stable recently (and I haven't got enough money for one of them nice new MacBooks), so I've made the leap to a netbook running Linux. This is the one application I can't find a decent equivalent for.

Ideally, I want an application that will maintain a database of all the metadata about the files on burned CD/DVD volumes. That metadata will obviously include the file names, creation/modification dates, but also ID3 data for audio files and the equivalent metadata for videos, photos, PDFs and all the other stuff I haven't really thought about. Search speed isn't tremendously important - it doesn't bother me if it takes fifteen seconds to do a search.

One of the things I would like would be for the data to be in an open format, and for the search tool to be usable from the command line (so I can use it over SSH).

I have done some Googling, but all I can find are the sort of things record collectors would use to keep track of their albums. Not what I want: I basically want UNIX's metadata-aware 'find' or 'locate' commands for unmounted volumes.

I've been thinking about building something like this myself as a fun little open-source project over the Christmas holidays. If someone has a suggestion of an existing project that would do what I want that is free, open source and preferably not tied to any windowing environments (command line ftw!), I'd be greatly appreciative.

Can my Macbook hard drive be revived?

salmacis — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 02:32:32 -0800

Is my Macbook hard drive dead? Last night my Macbook hard drive apparently failed. After a hard reboot, I got a flashing folder with a question mark, which indicates no bootable media found. When I booted with the install disk, there was no sign that the disk even existed in Disk Utilities. Is the disk totally dead or is there anything I can try to revive it? I'm comfortable with the idea of installing a new disk, and it's not like there was anything important on there, but it would be nice not to lose everything.

La Cie external drive failure

gen — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 17:27:01 -0800

Mac, Leopard, La Cie external hard disk drive spins but does not mount. What's my best option for getting data off this drive? I've got an external La Cie drive that won't mount. I've tried 3 of the 4 interfaces (USB 2.0, FW400, FW800) but cannot get this disk to mount. What are my best options for getting this data before retiring this drive?

Blu-Ray Menus - made simple[r]?

ostranenie — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:03:48 -0800

I want to develop BD-J / Xlet / GEM menus suitable for Blu-Ray disks but it's confusing... I want to develop Blu-Ray / BD-J / Xlet / GEM menus suitable for Blu-Ray disks but the Java API seems initially confusing, and not many websites agree on just how to implement a menu. Is there a GUI-based BD-J menu development tool I can buy for less than $5000 that will abstract away some of these woes?

This wikipedia article says there are Director-like packages that help author a menu, or even things that take in HTML and spit out GEM menus. But I haven't been able to find anything close to that - just Java APIs and classes and something called Xletview that will allow me to 'preview' a Blu-Ray menu. Am I really just not looking hard enough?

How do I mount a FAT32 drive on Vista?

Plug Dub In — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 17:19:27 -0800

I've got about 200 GB of files on my old Mac that I need to put on my shiny new Vista-running laptop. I've got a 300 GB USB drive. This should be easy... I formatted the disk as FAT32 on my Mac and copied all the files over. I plug it into the PC, and I get nada. Research says Vista don't like FAT32 for big disks at all.

I know about convert x: /FS:NTFS (or whatever that command was) but the drive doesn't have a letter and I can't seem to give it one.

If I reformat the drive as NTFS, my Mac won't be able to read it, right? I'm not really comfortable with MacFUSE, and MacFusion (the GUI version) only comes with FTP and SSH support.

I've got Virtual PC running XP, and VirtualBox running Ubuntu. Will either of those help?

Is there such a thing as an 3.5" IDE drive enclosure with an eSATA interface?

kenliu — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 17:36:49 -0800

Is there such a thing as a 3.5" IDE drive enclosure with an eSATA interface? My DVR (Cablevision Scientific Atlanta) has an eSATA port that can be used to expand the recording time (storage space).

I have several 3.5" old IDE drives laying around and want to hook one of these up to the DVR. Is there an enclosure for a PATA drive that has an eSATA interface?

I know that there are drives that have eSATA/USB interfaces, but the ones I have seen are limited to using the eSATA interface only with a SATA drive.

Alternatively, is there something that can convert a USB/Firewire device to eSATA?

MacFilter: Upgraded my hard drive using SuperDuper to clone, but Time Machine backed up the entire drive after the swap. How to prevent this?

kenliu — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 16:47:38 -0800

MacFilter: Upgraded my hard drive using SuperDuper to clone, but Time Machine backed up the entire drive after the swap. How to prevent this? I used SuperDuper to clone my internal laptop hard disk onto a larger hard disk in an external enclosure. The cloning process went fine, and I swapped the internal drive with the cloned one. Works great.

Unfortunately, next time I ran Time Machine, it backed up the entire contents of the freshly cloned drive onto the TM drive, thus eating up ~80GB of my TM drive. Now I need to replace my internal drive again (the replacement was too power hungry) but don't want TM to eat up another 80 GB.

Any way to prevent Time Machine from trying to back up the cloned drive?

Cloning a laptop hard drive

nomad73 — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 07:40:39 -0800

Replacing my laptop's hard drive. I think I've almost got it but have some questions about the cloning process. I'm replacing the 60GB EIDE main hard drive (C: drive) of my 4 year old laptop with Win XP Home. I've got a new 160GB EIDE drive, a 2.5" hard drive enclosure, and was planning on using XXCLONE to get the job done. All has gone well so far - I've connected the new drive to the laptop via the USB enclosure, and formatted it. Here are my questions:

1) When I formatted the new drive (using the Windows disk management tool) it asked me to pick a drive letter. I picked a random letter down the alphabet - H: - so as not to get confused with the other two external USB drives I've got running. If the idea is to make a clone of my C: drive and then take it out of my laptop and install my new drive, will the drive letter matter? Will the OS simply see the new drive as the C: drive even though I named it H: when I formatted it? If not, how do I go about naming the new drive C: while I've still got to clone the actual C: drive?

2) XXCLONE has the option, when cloning, to make the new drive bootable - which is what I would like to do, I assume. It copies the master boot record and all that. Does that mean that no matter the drive letter I assign to the new drive, when i pop it into my laptop, it will just boot from the new drive and everything will be fine?

3) Other cloning programs seem to either create a bootable CD that you then run while the C: drive is cloned. XXCLONE does not do this - it operates in XP. Will that present any problems in terms of not copying EVERY exact OS file? I'd rather not spend the $ on Norton Ghost or the full version of Acronis True Image, hence why I'm using XXCLONE - free.

Thank you for any advice you may have. Much appreciated.