nixcraft's hardware links

The problem of cooling the computer is not new. The more powerful and faster computers become, the "hotter" they get. Coolers inside computer cases, video card and power supply units are quite common nowadays. However, hard disk has no additional means to cool them. Most hard disk manufacture recommends 35-40°C working temperature for a hard drive. Once it crossed the limit safety of your data and hard disk becomes critical. Computer hard drive is the main storage media for your data.

This article explains how to monitor hard disk temperature and prevent the loss of data under Linux using automated scripts.

We have 5 Dell server collocated running CentOS 4.x and 5.x server operating system. Sometime my file system (ext3) goes read-only. I’d like to know what could be causing such a problem?

smartctl command controls the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) system built into many ATA-3 and later ATA, IDE and SCSI-3 hard drives. The purpose of SMART is to monitor the reliability of the hard drive and predict drive failures, and to carry out different types of drive self-tests.

smartctl is a command line utility designed to perform SMART tasks such as printing the SMART self-test and error logs, enabling and disabling SMART automatic testing, and initiating device self-tests.

This article demonstrates usage of smartctl tool to test if hard disk is going bad.

The stress test of hardware (hard drive benchmarks) is a simplistic test. There are a number of benchmarking applications software that can be used as hard disk (storage) stress testing. My favorite is Bonnie++ software.

Bonnie++ is a benchmark suite that is aimed at performing a number of simple tests of hard drive and file system performance. Then you can decide which test is important and decide how to compare different systems after running it.