Category: storage / NAS / QNAP

IDE, SCSI, SATA, SAS now U.2 M.2… these drives are called: “U.2 PCIe NVMe” no kidding, search for em on ebay. that reminds of… “the usb cable chaos” has arrived with “Slim SAS” for another round of mass cable connector confusion […]

ZFS is probably THE most controversial filesytem in the known universe: “FOSS means that effort is shared across organizations and lowers maintenance costs significantly” (src: comment by JohnFOSS on itsfoss.com) “Mathematicians have a term for this.  When you rearrange the […]

possible (untested!) alternative: SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD V2 Review the harddisk reliability toplist: while this toplist says nothing about how reliable the harddisk can store and return exact copy of data written (!!!). this has to be tested in […]

nfs is to GNU-Linux what smb is to Windows: sharing dirs & files “The Network File System (NFS) was developed to allow machines to mount a disk partition on a remote machine as if it were a local disk. It […]

making usb sticks with GNU Linux and dd: WARNING! one single wrong drive letter and data could be irreversible destroyed! (it has happened many times before!!!) so this script make_stick.sh (download it here) aim’s to double check if it is […]

raid10 combines the speed of raid0 with the resilience of raid1. watch out: shingled hdd are not good for RAID! setup of GNU Linux mdadm software RAID10 is actually pretty straight forward: no need to do any partitioning. # tested […]

update 2025: very basic cross os distribution monitor harddisk speeds bash script by counting sector read write UPDATE: 2022 may have to appoligize to HighPoint and ALTERNATE, as other RAID systems such as the AMD RAIDXpert2 based systems (same concept) […]

for even better overview, it is possible to label harddisks & partitions like this: # this can be done on mounted ext4 / ext3 / ext2 partitions # swap partitions can not be labeled tune2fs -L “LABEL” /dev/sdaX # with […]

for some reason… did ext3 on RAID1 with two disks (seagate + wd) of different sized (2TB but they (of course) are not exactly 2TB) watch out: shingled hdd are not good for RAID! not sure where the problem here […]

Byte The term byte was coined by Werner Buchholz in June 1956,[4][13][14][b] during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch[15][16][1][13][14][17][18] computer, http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/IBM/Stretch/pdfs/Buchholz_102636426.pdf backup mirror: PLANNING A COMPUTER SYSTEM BROJECT STRETCH Buchholz Campbell_102636426.pdf which had addressing to the bit and […]

if hfs+ is greyed out in gparted there is hfs+ compatibility software missing hint: sudo should be up and running, or gparted won’t be able to open a display (as root) and won’t be able to create partitions (as non […]

to recover the data: how to mount luks2 encrypted volume also check out alternative: GNU Linux – create new encrypted partition harddisk – how to open encrypted harddisk partition possibility: remove harddisk, attach to sata2usb adapter, then mount on different […]

btw: love kvm (used by very large companies) just as virtualbox (oracle) the task: over the years a windows vm is using up massive amounts of precious server harddisk space (snapshots before everyupdate) all the snapshots now add up to […]

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/benchmarking update 2025: very basic cross os distribution monitor harddisk speeds bash script by counting sector read write update 2022: next to the good old (non-destructive if used correctly) “dd” is still the way to go for benchmarking harddisks under […]

apt update apt upgrade is what users do… having no idea of the “heart attack” momentum that is awaiting them X-D after a reboot… and 1min 30sec timeout, the dreaded Control+D give root password prompt appears. “Houston we have a […]

imho git is a bitch it’s not intuitive it’s not easy but at least pray it’s a well thought out system (it works for Linus does not mean it works for all) https://dwaves.de/2016/10/01/githhub-com-cheat-sheet/ home of git’s git repo: https://git-scm.com/ # […]

(click here for two html embedded test video files, if the user’s browser can playback 264x and 265x) lsb_release -a; # tested with No LSB modules are available. Distributor ID: Debian Description: Debian GNU/Linux 10 (buster) Release: 10 Codename: buster […]

for good overview it makes sense to label the harddisk partitions according to functionality (what is their purpose?) GNU Linux bash – how to label partitions tune2fs (xfs & ext4) all infos about one’s harddisk: # tested on: hostnamectl Static […]

mdadm -E /dev/sd[a-z] # -E, –examine # Print contents of the metadata stored on the named device(s). # Note the contrast between –examine and –detail. # –examine applies to devices which are components of an array, while # –detail applies […]

spoiler alert: this is work in progress… was told by Adaptec support to upgrade firmware. did not do that yet – because firmware upgrades on production systems are sometimes very risky endeavors. one of the most important features of a […]

for good overview it makes sense to label the harddisk partitions according to functionality (what is their purpose?) GNU Linux bash – how to label partitions tune2fs (xfs & ext4) … because maybe one wants to read their smart status. […]

monitoring the integrity of a RAID is critical for fast replacement of failed harddisks (ideally one has at least one spare drive already in the machine) if not – it would be great if hard- and software-raid would send a […]

especially in times of EU-GDPR–DSGVO but also for the user’s privacy effectively shredding data is important. if the admin-user wants to wipe-shred-secure-delete entire harddisks look at this article. GNU Linux Debian 10 can do that 🙂 update: 2024: want to […]

problem: manually changing uuids is tidious and might not yield the result you want. unfortunately have not succeeded yet with integrating an old harddisk.vdi (same uuids) back into the template vm (same uuids) – so the recommendation is: reinstall os […]

for good overview it makes sense to label the harddisk partitions according to functionality (what is their purpose?) GNU Linux bash – how to label partitions tune2fs (xfs & ext4) # where is what & updates over changes (usb disk […]

the best about samba: thanks for samba, it provides users with a fast (of course depends also on harddisk speed) rock-solid no-limit-to-maximum-users file-server for maximum file-transfer-and-sharing-and-storage productivity (and they will USE that T: temp drive for EVERYTHING! prepare for TERRABYTES […]

the best about samba: thanks for samba, it provides users with a fast (of course depends also on harddisk speed) rock-solid no-limit-to-maximum-users file-server for maximum file-transfer-and-sharing-and-storage productivity (and they will USE that T: temp drive for EVERYTHING! prepare for TERRABYTES […]

long story short: “The Year 2038 problem is where the Unix time can no longer be stored in a signed 32-bit integer and thus after 19 January 2038 will begin wrapping around as a negative number for representing the number […]

this is a very very basic sequential harddisk write test performed on host and guest. there are multiple ways, how you could improve the performance: Use fixed size disks Allocate RAM and CPUs wisely Install the Guest Additions enable host […]

update: 2022: another x86x odroid is in the making! https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h3-plus/ $165.00 Estimated next batch : Middle of January, 2023 the itsec troubles: CPU Intel Celeron Processor J Series is Spectre & Meltdown affected (src) while Spectre & Meltdown based hack […]