Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with harddisk

How to get back normal "disk check" behaviour on Windows XP startup? (seems broken, or there's something strange in the disk)

lion — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 04:14:49 -0800

During Windows XP startup process, it keeps asking to press a key if I want to skip the disk check progress for the C drive. But if I let it check, it finds no errors at all. I do clean shutdown. Strange behaviour - how to restore normal one? When I load Windows XP, during the startup process, it keeps showing the light blue screen with white text asking to press a key if I want to skip the disk check progress, for the C drive (I have two partitions, C and D). But if I let it check, it finds no errors at all.

What should I try to restore the normal Windows functionality, so that Windows will trigger that only when something has gone wrong (e.g. bad shutdown, etc.)?

I don't know which action has "broken" the process. If it's useful to know, I've loaded a Ubuntu live CD and browsed the C drive. Moreover, one day the D drive was very short of space (around zero), so one day the hdd scratched for memory swap a lot.

A Momentus Hard Drive Decision

alms — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 10:21:37 -0800

Do any retailers have the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 hard drive in stock? If not, should I just give up and buy a 5400.6? I need a larger hard drive for my MacBook Pro. Thinking to get the best, I decided to wait for the 500GB 7200 RPM drive from Seagate, the Momentus 7200.4. Unfortunately, I've been waiting for about two months now, and there's still no indication of when I might be able to get a drive.

Does anyone know where I can get one of these? Has anyone heard any rumors about upcoming availability? Seagate did ship some, and people seem to love them. Why aren't they producing any more?

I really need more hard drive in my laptop. At this point I'm considering just giving up and getting the 5400.6. Any thoughts on the tradeoffs? Will I regret settling for second best?

How do I remove music files not used in iTunes?

fireoyster — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 19:48:24 -0800

How can I delete music files that are no longer used in iTunes, but are still present on disk? My wife has been using iTunes for awhile and is running out of disk space. While looking around, she realized she's been deleting songs from iTunes but they weren't being deleted from her hard disk. I've just confirmed that adding a song then deleting it only prompts to confirm the removal from the library, doesn't ask about deleting the file and doesn't actually delete the file.

So: How can these unused music files be found and deleted? Would simply checking the "Keep iTunes Music Folder Organized?" box work here?

I only found solutions for removing mass numbers of orphaned entries from iTunes (i.e. file gone but still listed in the library), but I need the reverse. As her library is rather large, doing this manually is unappealing. In addition, only iTunes-purchased music is in the "iTunes Music" directory; the remainder of MP3s and such are in two or three other directories from which files have been dragged into iTunes. Having to combine all the files into one directory (iTunes Music?) is an option if it'll help.

Much obliged from a MeFi newbie.

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

How can I monitor a disc rewrite process in Ubuntu?

carsonb — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 07:45:38 -0800

I'm using Terminal (Ubuntu 8.04x64) right now to overwrite a 500g external hd with random information. There's been no action aside from a blinking cursor (by itself on a line, not in front of any prompt) since I entered the command yesterday afternoon:
[sudo dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sdc bs=8m]

I understand it's going to take a while to finish. In the meantime, is there any way to monitor the progress of the operation?

How do I access my network storage from my new computer?

carsonb — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 23:48:11 -0800

How can I access my WD MyBook World Network Storage Drive from my new (Ubuntu 8.04) computer now that my old (WinXP) box is dead dead dead? I can access the PUBLIC folder no problem, but I have ~100Gb of music in a different folder that's behind a user/pass that I think I had stored in MioNet but can't remember anymore. So, a few questions if you please,

Is there a way for me to access this folder without MioNet? I downloaded Wine today; can I use that to run MioNet? Would that help? Would an SSH tunnel give me access? (damn damn damn MioNet! I'd much prefer to stay away from that horrid program.)

(I've seen the above question answered on the Ubuntu forums, but get stuck on the first step, thus:)
How can I find out the IP address for my network drive? Ubuntu 'sees' it, but I can't seem to wring any relevant information out of what's presented.

Finally, given the answer to the above question, and if it comes to this, will resetting the admin password on the drive (using a paperclip in the little hole on the back) erase all my data?

There's a small chance I can get my old box up and running for a short time, but I salvaged the network card from it so it's offline. I'm really feeling my way through the transition from Windows to Ubuntu, and am not yet altogether familiar with the Terminal interface, so please try to be clear and refrain from jargon without explanation. Thank you very much for any help!

DeadMacFilter: Will Target Disk mode screw up my healthy computer?

neroli — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 08:22:49 -0800

Dead hard disk on a G3 iMac. Seemingly healthy 2nd-hand G4 iMac. If I try to access data on the dead machine via target disk mode, is there a chance—any chance at all—that I could screw up the healthy machine? (Note: I’m a total computer illiterate. Or rather, I have been a total computer illiterate—I don’t want to be any more. So, apologies in advance for obvious dimness.)

My long-ailing ancient iMac finally bit the dust. Can only boot from the (OS 9) system disk; hard drive won’t mount. Ran Disk Repair: “MountCheck found serious errors.” Tried to repair many times: no go.

Now, this isn’t a terrible tragedy. I knew the old guy was on its last legs. I have back-ups of pretty much all my important files—on CDs and on my work computer. It isn’t worth it to me to pay for a data recovery service. I don’t even want to spend the money and the effort to get Disk Warrior. But there were some photos and documents on the G3 that I don’t have a copy of. Nothing essential, but it would be nice to have them back.

I hadn’t saved up enough to buy to the new machine I wanted, but I got a really good deal on a refurb G4 iMac (800 MHz, PowerPC, running Tiger), which I figured would keep me going for the time being. And actually, I like this computer a lot. I want to keep it healthy as long as possible.

So: I have a working computer, a dead computer, and a FireWire cable. Trying to mount the hard disk on the working machine with target disk mode looks relatively straightforward, even for someone like me. I’m not holding out much hope that I’ll be able to get the files, but I’d like to try one more thing before I give up.

But before I do this, I want to be totally, absolutely sure that this won’t cause any unforeseen problems on the healthy machine. I know it’s no spring chicken itself. I have a 60-day hardware warranty and no system disk for the G4. I really, really don’t want to screw it up. (I don’t care what happens to the G3, and I’ve pretty much given up the data for lost, so no worries on that end.)

Can someone who knows something about all this either reassure me or warn me off? Many thanks.

How best to respond to a bad sector?

puffin — Tue, 20 May 2008 19:35:39 -0800

Inconsistent information about bad sectors on a hard drive -- what's going on, and what should I do? I am using an Ubuntu LiveCD to install Ubuntu on my friend's ThinkPad. When I try to run gparted in order to partition the drive, I get this error:
---------------------------
ntfsresize v2.0.0 (libntfs 10:0:0)
Device name : /dev/sda1
NTFS volume version: 3.1
Cluster size : 4096 bytes
Current volume size: 94034993664 bytes (94035 MB)
Current device size: 94035239424 bytes (94036 MB)
Checking for bad sectors ...
Bad cluster: 0x1300db4 - 0x1300db4 (1)
ERROR: This software has detected that the disk has at least 1 bad sector.
---------------------------------
I have run "chkdsk /f /r' and no errors were found. I also tried SeaTools (the Seagate hard disk diagnostic tool), which found 1 error and repaired it. Further scans with chkdsk and SeaTools no longer detect errors.

But when I boot the LiveCD again and run gparted, I still get the same error message about a bad sector from ntfsresize.

My questions:
- Which program is right, ntfsresize or chkdsk and SeaTools?
- Is one bad sector really something to worried about? Should I tell my friend to consider replacing the hard drive, and give up on installing Ubuntu for now?
- Will reformatting the drive fix the bad sector?
- If possible/advisable, how should I go about partitioning the drive without using gparted? I know I have to use ntfsresize using the --bad-sectors option, but after that I am not sure what to do.

I've dual booted Ubuntu and XP on my own computer for the past two and half years, but I never ran into a problem like this. (And yes, I checked the Ubuntu forums, where I found a lot of relevant threads with mostly conflicting and inconclusive responses.)

Speaker vs Hard Disk

armoured-ant — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:23:20 -0800

I have an external firewire hard disk sitting on top on a powered monitor speaker on my desk here. Is this a terrible idea? Will it shorten the life of the drive? What's a safe distance? The drive is a MyBook, and the speaker is a Tapco S5. Thanks folks!

Hard drive pain.

gjc — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 22:15:04 -0800

Highly technical hard drive filter: My hard drive failed. Came home, and PC was sitting at the "where's my hard drive" BIOS screen, to my great horror. My question is more of a "please confirm my diagnosis" and "what have I missed" sort of thing. Hard drive does not spin at all. In fact, it does nothing at all. Doesn't spin, click, hum, vibrate, whine. And the PC doesn't see it.

I looked at the controller board and could find no burnt spots nor any visual indication that something was fried. I even pulled off the board to make sure the contacts were clean. Completely fine, visually. If I give the drive a twist along the axis of the platters, I can hear them move, so I know the platters aren't stuck. And there is nothing rattling around inside.

So my thinking is that the controller simply went belly up, and if I go out and get another identical hard drive and swap controllers, it will function long enough to get the data off. I have done this in the past with success, on an older IDE drive of the 4GB vintage. This drive is a 7 year old SATA drive.

But there are comments on websites saying that there is "tuning" information on the controller, and thus it won't work. I'm not sure I believe that- sounds more like scare tactics perpetrated by data recovery people to drum up business. But maybe not? Is the bad sector table stored on the board?

Anyway, thanks in advance.

Historical hard disk drive prices?

jaimev — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 17:40:59 -0800

Are there any repositories of historical prices for hard drives? Something that can tell me how the price (US $) of a 250 Gb IDE drive has changed in the last 2 years, or a 500 Gb IDE drive over the last year.

A->B instead of B->A?!?!?

notsnot — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 05:39:13 -0800

How to recover from sync-ing a RAID 1 the wrong way? So I bought a couple 300G drives a while back, put 'em in RAID 1, and one of them died. Ijust now finally got around to RMAing the defective drive back to Seagate. Mind you, for the last nine months I've been using this single drive as a repository for all my photoshop work (all the RAW files are on another RAID pair).

So last night, I hooked up the fresh drive, turned on RAID in the bios, designated the two drives as a RAID group in the POST ("hit F10...") doohickey, and went to Windows. There, I ran the Nvidia media manager, saw both drives, and told it to sychronize the drives. This morning, I woke up and looked at the drive letter represented by these drives....and it's empty. In fact, Windows sees an unformatted drive. Best I can tell, the Nvidia program synced the drive with all my beautiful data to the empty drive, instead of the other way around.

WTF do I do now? First thing, I shut the machine down, and turned off RAID in the bios, so I can see both drives, both looking to Windows like unformatted drives. I'm unsure what I can do now to save my data! (Yes, I know I should have backed the fuck up. I didn't.)

Other information: ASUS M2n-SLI, Seagate 300G drives, Phenom/8G RAM. I'm not near the computer until this evening, but wanted to get y'alls thoughts.

Lazarus?

popcassady — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 12:25:16 -0800

I still have hope for my dead HDD. How do I bring it back to life? The other day, in an attempt to connect an external CD drive to my iBook, I decided to rip open my LaCie.

When it came to reconnecting the HDD to the LaCie hardware, I was stupid enough to do this with the power flowing. I was also stupid enough to try and connect the molex the wrong way round. A few sparks and a terrible odour later, I plugged the LaCie into the iBook. ...Not a whimper from the LaCie.

I took the HDD out of the chassis and connected it directly to my PC. Still dead. I know little about HDD repair but as I can't afford to send it to a specialist, it's DIY all the way.

I assumed that the problem was with the PCB. Luckily I was able to track down a board that matched the model of my HDD: Seagate Barracuda, model: ST3250823A, p/n: 9Y7283-511, firmware: 3.03.

The new board arrived today. I swapped it for the old one, reconnected everything, and plugged it in.

It spins up fine, which is an improvement at least. But after that, nothing. It doesn't do the clicky, clicky thing and neither will it mount. I've tried other HDDs in the LaCie chassis and they work fine. I connected the seagate to my PC, it spun up but still no clicky, clicky. I assume the problem is with the board... not an exact match? But, as I said, I know very little about HDD repair and so I'm worried that the problem is worse than I expected.

The new PCB was rather pricey but as a last resort, I'm considering taking a 12w soldering iron and swapping the suspect component. (I've located the component, the crack and the smell give it away, but I'm not sure what it is. It's a small black square with two thick legs at either end. The one on the old PCB is marked: QE R524, and the new one is marked: AE GP519 -- are these resistors? Do they share the same value?)

So, where do I go from here? Is the problem with the PCB? Will I see my work again? Is no clicky, clicky a bad sign?

Are there any particularly awesome external firewire hard drive enclosures that I should be aware about?

chunking express — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 13:43:34 -0800

Are there any particularly awesome external firewire hard drive enclosures that I should be aware about? I want to put a Western Digital 500 GB SATA drive in one. I'm interested in enclosures people have actually used. (I can find reviews online myself.)

File recovery from a formatted drive

springload — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 12:18:51 -0800

How can I recover a file from an accidentally quick-formated laptop? The laptop (HP) wouldn't boot, so I used a Knoppix CD to copy Documents and Settings to a USB drive before examining HP's provided recovery options. While I did so, the tool somewhat unexpectedly formatted the drive and reinstalled Windows XP. I thought it wasn't a problem, until the one important Word file turned out not to be found under Documents and Settings. The formatting procedure didn't take more than a minute or two, so the drive clearly wasn't wiped. I have some hope that the Windows installation didn't overwrite this particular file, but I don't know what to do to get it back.

What programs should I try? Is there anything available for free?

Since I'd prefer not to boot from this drive, is it possible to make a Windows bootable USB with enough drivers to get the computer started, or should I open the case and take the drive out? Or is it ok to boot from it as long as I only run programs from the external drive?

If your suggestion is Linux based, detailed suggestions are highly appreciated, as I know very little of it. Thanks in advance!

how to clone failing disk in RAID 0 array

nnovik — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 12:44:22 -0800

One of the disks in my hardware RAID 0 system drive array is failing, but it's still booting for the moment. Is there any tool I can use to clone just the failing physical disk to another identical one? Typical drive image software will not work for this because Windows sees the two disks in the RAID 0 array as a single volume.

What I need to do is basically mirror the failing disk exactly onto the replacement. I just can't find a tool that will do this -- all my searching keeps turning up drive image tools that run under windows and will happily clone the *entire* drive, but not just the one failing disk.

Because it is a large drive (each one is 500 MB -- I know, I know; I was going to move to RAID 5 shortly, and just hadn't had the time :/) I would like to avoid having to go out and get a 1TB drive to clone the entire disk, not just for expense but because I am afraid that the amount of time it will take to clone everything will increase the chances the disk will die for good somewhere in there.

Any suggestions?

Please save my subfactors!

number9dream — Thu, 17 May 2007 21:02:52 -0800

Please help me save my master's thesis... The folder on my Windows XP computer which contains my Master's thesis will no longer open. Everything else on my computer is fine, but when I double-click that folder, everything stalls for about a minute, and then I get a message that says "The disk in drive C: is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?" Obviously I chose no.

Is there any way I can fix this? I've tried restarting and it does no good.

Full disclosure: this isn't as bad as it sounds. I got my Master's two years ago, and I have a hard copy of my thesis. I also have a slightly less than final draft on another machine, but I'd really rather not lose this version. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

How to clone a harddrive?

Mave_80 — Wed, 09 May 2007 18:25:20 -0800

I want to install a bigger hard drive to my laptop. How do I clone the current hard drive to the new one so I don't have to reinstall windows on the new disk? I have an external USB enclosure that I can put the new HDD in. I have the new HDD. I'm assuming I can use Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image to do so. Thing is, I'm not sure if there's an obvious option to use. Recommendations on software and the process to do so? I'll probably only use the software a couple of times and am not interested in bits and pieces of the disk. I just want a simple one shot deal that will copy the entire disk (including OS) without major hassle. Providing it costs under $50 not too worried about price, although free is obviously better.

Side notes: I will obviously back up all important data on the laptop first. Also, my laptop does not have a built in CD drive, only an external USB one. (I do have 2 USB ports available though). Finally, I've read these previous AskMe threads:
1. How to install old OS on a new laptop harddrive This thread is from a year and half ago - are Ghost and True Image still my best options?
2. Disk imaging utility Ghost wasn't mentioned - True Image was. Should I take a hint?
3. Ghost has given up the ghost.

Thanks for all your help!

Load Testing the Hard Disk on a Win2k Server.

seanyboy — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 07:22:38 -0800

Are there any utilities for windows that continuously read/write to a hard disk? I've got a server which seems to be having problems reading & writing to disk. It freezes randomly. Anyway, I'm looking for a utility that I can run in multiple Remote Desktop sessions that constantly reads and writes to disk. Has anyone got any suggestions for any software that'll do load testing like this?

XP unusably slow after STOP errors and running checkdisk - what's going on?

goodnewsfortheinsane — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 12:29:42 -0800

So it's come to this - I see no other option than to ask a "help me fix my PC" question. After some troubleshooting the STOP errors seem to have been resolved, XP now boots successfully but is excruciating slow to the point of being unusable. Details and specs below the fold. Specifications:
-Intel Celeron 2.4GHz
-1 x 512 MB RAM
-XP Pro SP2
-PCI Firewire card
-onboard: USB 2.0, VIA Gigabit Ethernet adapter

IDE config:

1M: HD Maxtor 80 GB U-ATA
1S: empty
2M: DVD Burner
2S: DVD-ROM

First, the BIOS would occasionally fail to find the boot device (HD). Setting the primary master to "Not Installed" and rebooting, and then back to "Auto" remedied this for the time being.

Then a few days ago the machine started throwing a bunch of BSODs during normal operation. I recorded some of them for your viewing pleasure:

0x000000F4, 0x00000003, 0x829FF020, 0x829FF194 0xc000000E, 0xC000000E, 0x00000000, 0x05357000 0x0000007A (0XC03E1128, 0XC0000185, 0XF844A074, 0X08195860) ACPI.SYS 0x0000008E (0XC0000005, 0X8054AE34, 0XF6505BF4, 0X00000000)

Eventually XP wouldn't boot at all: system32/config was 'corrupted', or something along those lines. I assume this happened as a result of one of the STOP errors.

For some reason CHKDSK wouldn't run on this machine, so I took out the drive and ran CHKDSK on it with the drive attached to another machine. It did find a bunch of errors and corrected them all.

I put it back in its own box, and ran CHKDSK again from the Recovery Console (ran fine this time, and found no errors) and also a FIXBOOT for good measure.

Which brings us to the current situation. The system32/config error is gone, and Windows does boot, *but*:

-The XP splash screen fades in very slowly and seems halted here and there.
-Upon logon, the desktop background loads but no icons or taskbar appear.
-I can load explorer and systray via taskmgr, and sometimes they eventually load on their own without intervention, but this takes a *long* time. Somewhere in the ten minutes order of magnitude.

So technically speaking, Windows now runs, but it's so excruciatingly slow it's basically unusable.

Additional details:
-I have run a Spybot Search & Destroy scan: it found some threats and removed them. No new findings upon further boots and/or Spybot runs.
-I would scan for viruses, but I can't install AVG Free: I just removed the old 7.1 version (had to anyway as it was no longer supported), and the 7.5 installer happily skips from "pick a directory" to "Installation Complete!" but never seems to have touched a file at all! Doesn't even create the specified directory in Program Files.
-Network now also doesn't work. The Network Connections window says "Connected" but the machine receives no IP address nor lease from router. Router and rest of network are running fine.
-I tried System Restore with a variety of restore points from the past two weeks or so, but after going through the process (which also takes very long) it reboots and tells me that restoring to the previous point failed.

In short, I'm confused and could really use your insight. What's causing this and how can I fix it? Thanks in advance for any light you can shed upon this. If you have any questions or need any further details, I'd be happy to answer and provide them.

Is it possible to use a USB hard disc enclosure with a CD-ROM?

Bugbread — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 10:07:59 -0800

Is it possible to use a USB hard disc enclosure with a CD-R/RW? I'm trying to install Ubuntu on a laptop without a CD drive. I've looked into using a USB flash drive, but apparently the installation is fraught with peril. However, everyone agrees that installing from an installation CD is easy as pie.

However, I don't have a USB CD drive either.

What I do have is a USB hard drive that's collecting dust, and an internal CD-R/RW that is also collecting dust.

I know that the CD-R/RW will not actually fit in the enclosure, and that the whole thing would be jury-rigged as all hell, but I only need it to work until Ubuntu is installed.

So, could I hook the IDE port of the CD-R/RW to the IDE interface at the back of the enclosure, the power port to the power port on the enclosure, plug the power cable of the enclosure into the wall, and plug the USB port into the laptop, thereby making the HDD enclosure act like a CD-R/RW enclosure?

How does Windows label hard disks?

Symeon — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 11:25:02 -0800

How does Windows XP label hard disks? In Windows XP, I'm getting the following error in the Event Viewer: "An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk2\D during a paging operation."

The problem: I have a few drives (each containing a single partition -- C, D, H, I, J, and K). In Disk Management, "Disk 2" contains (is) the J partition, while D is on "Disk 5." Is there an easy way to determine the disk about which the error is referring?

Namely, is there a little command I can run to find "Harddisk2" (which I assume is different from the Disk Management label of "Disk 2")?

Or am I being completely stupid, and "\Harddisk2\D" is telling me to look at the disk containing partition D?

Recommend a backup device for a Mac

adrianhon — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 12:20:18 -0800

I need a good 500GB backup device for a Mac - any recommendations? I already use a Maxtor OneTouch II 200GB, but sure as young people keep on becoming more disrespectful to their elders, so are my number of files increasing. I probably need something like 500GB capacity. I gather that most backup devices are pretty similar, but I'm sure there must be some that are regarded better than others.

The OneTouch used Retrospect Express, which worked very well for me, and it would be nice to get a drive with similar software. I'm unsure about whether a Firewire or USB2.0 interface would better (I have Firewire 400 on my Mac). USB seems to be cheaper, but I've read that it's slightly slower - any comments on this?

Also, I keep on reading about backup devices that can also do other stuff on networks, like stream music or whatever. Are these useful and worth having? Cheers!

Could turning on disk compression actually speed up disk access?

Ookseer — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 01:27:56 -0800

Could turning on hard drive compression actually speed up access on my laptop? I have an ultraportable laptop. It's got a decent processor and enough ram, but it has one of those tiny 80GB Toshiba iPod hard drives in it and the speed, both access and transfer is awful. (Plenty good for an iPod, horrible for real computing.)

I run a few applications that access the hard drive quite a bit, either loading or writing a decent amount of data. When I look at the task manager, my HD light is on solid while my CPU usage is around 15%. I'd, of course, love to speed up access.

So my thinking goes like this: If I click the "Compress drive to save disk space" it will put a little more data in every sector, so each seek and read should be a little more efficient. Since my CPU is near idle anyway it could use those extra cycles to process the compression.

So the question: Is this assumption true?
Are there other drawbacks to compressed NTFS volumes? (Like being more likely to go corrupt, harder to recover corrupted files, fragmentation, etc?)

(And I'll throw in an extra related Q: Is there a way to tell Windows XP Pro to try to fill up more real ram before it start paging?)

Backup Strategy and External HDD Resilience

mooders — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 13:34:04 -0800

Hello! I have a backup strategy, which I think is okay but I would like some advice on whether my use of the external hdd is sensible. A little So I backup important data to iBackup (no affiliation - but I do recommend them) on a nightly basis using an automated job. Works a treat.

I also backup on a weekly automated basis to my external hard drive so I have a reasonably recent backup should my internet connection fail / iBackup disappears etc. For this, I power on the hdd enclosure sometime Sunday (whenever I remember to or am prompted by the scheduler) and once I see the job has completed, I use the tasktray 'Safely remove hardware' facility to remove the hdd from Windows before powering the enclosure down.

I'm happy with the routine and the software, so I guess the question is whether I am shortening the life of the hard drive by powering up and powering down once a week - should I just leave the hdd enclosure on permanently? Also, what would happen if I didn't use the 'Safely remove hardware' facility - what could I damage by just powering down?

For info, I am using a fully-patched WinXP SP2 with a Seagate Barracuda 200GB IDE drive inside a standard USB 2.0 enclosure.

Many thanks in advance for the words of wisdom, HiveMind!