SuperLinux Encyclopedia - Disk Drives

Also see Filesystems and "SCSI controllers" on main page.

General Subject:

• Partitioning hard drives
• Recovery of corrupted filesystems
• RAID  Fault-tolerant storage systems.
• Multi-Disk HOWTO  Great document on drives, partitioning, etc.
• Disk Defragmentation notes  By C.Browne
• 8.4 "Barrier":
  • Page at Maxtor
  • Page at Quatum
  • Page at Western Digital
  • Intalling Red Hat 5.2 on a > 8.4 disk

  • FROM USENET: Don't use Disk Druid since it cannot handle a disk of size > 8 gig. The trick is to use fdisk, and go into the expert mode (by typing x). Then, enter the exact C/H/S number from the specification on your drive. fdisk should allow you to partiition the drive now.

    FROM USENET: It's solved ! I keeped LBA for the disk and I must use this option : hda=26353,16,63 with lilo or loadlin, but lilo can't boot the kernel because the vmlinuz is not below the 1024 cyls barrier ! Loadlin work great

• Linux Disk Editor  Change disk at very low levels.
• Mass Storage Devices
• Ask Slashdot: Spanning Networked Disks?
• Large Disk mini-HOWTO  How to use disks with > 1024 cylinders.
• Multi-Disk HOWTO  How to setup multiple hard disk drives.
• Hard Disk Upgrade mini-HOWTO  How to copy a Linux system from one hard disk to another.
• Dandelion Digital's Linux Home Page (has a Quantum disk drive page)
• Nstor Corp.  Fiber-channel mass storage devices, etc.
• The Swarm Scalable Storage System "project is to design and implement a scalable network storage system based on a cluster of personal computers."
• Storage Review (benchmarks, etc; not Linux-specific)
• Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory (Doc by Peter Gutmann)
• Wipe "for securely erasing files from magnetic media" (over-rights with various patterns)
• Ask Slashdot: How rugged are HDs?
• Ask Slashdot: Best Filesystem to Use When Moving HDs Between Unix Boxen?
• Adding a Second IDE Hard Drive 

Drive Makers/Sellers:

• AC&NC  RAID disk arrays.
• Atecon, Inc.  RAID and Networked Storage HW/SW products.
• Maxtor
• Pegasus Disk Technologies, Inc.  $; Announced plans for Linux "storage management software".
• Promise
• Quatum
• RAIDZONE  RAID disk arrays; case and racks. Has own high-performance PCI interface; non-SCSI.
• Seagate  (bought Connor)
• Western Digital

Portable or Removable Disk Drives:

• Zip drives
• Ask Slashdot: Zip? Avatar? Syquest? Which Portable Drive is a Good Deal?
• Ask Slashdot: Best Filesystem to Use When Moving HDs Between Unix Boxen?

Floppy Disk Drives:

• There is an "fd" man page that describes the floppy disk devices.
• Some programs: floppycontrol, getfdprm, setfdprm, superformat, fdformat.
• Floppy Disk Tips  Jan'97 LG
• Supermount: Mounting Floppies the Very Easy Way  Nov'95 LG
• Space Savings with a Floppy Library  Nov'95 LG

IDE/EIDE/ATAPI/Ultra-DMA/UDMA:

• Ultra-DMA mini-HOWTO  How to use Ultra-DMA drives and controllers. (sunsite)
• Ultra-DMA Mini-Howto (at maintainer's site?)
• ide.txt  Important info for users of ATA devices (IDE/EIDE disks and CD-ROMS).
• ATAPI FAQ (at sunsite)
• Ultra-DMA info (at Chaintech)
• DMA and UDMA VT82C586B VIA Driver for linux 2.0.33
• S.M.A.R.T  Uses some IDE's failure reporting mechanism to warn of impending failure.

SCSI:

• scis-idle  Prog and daemon to start/stop drives as needed.

End of page.