Today's article is all about checking disk health...

KGIII

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It's the SMART thing to do, I suppose. I used no such pun in the article. I don't want to start a bad precedent.


Feedback is always good. The article was written while exhausted, so who knows.
 


How are you estimating how long to read ? i timed myself and it took 2 minutes
 
The average for English is 200 to 250, when reading for comprehension. So, I use 200 and 12 seconds per picture.

Well, no... I don't... It's automatically done with those parameters.

It's not 'how quickly can I read this', it's 'how long will someone take to read this comfortably and with comprehension'.

So, I just leave it set at 200 WPM and 5 pictures per minute. Anyone that's a native English speaker can almost certainly read it faster, but that's not what's being measured.
 
I've never placed much faith in these "Disk Health Tools", everything fails eventually...sometimes without warning, the best thing I've found is to create an Image of the System every month or so...stored on an External HDD or two. :)

Should the HDD/SSD fail, it's a simple matter to put the Image on a new Drive...be up and running in 15 to 20 minutes with nothing lost.
happy0034.gif
 
SMART is pretty good at saying that a drive will fail soon - sort of. (As is in the article.)

If it says it's going to fail, it's almost certainly going to fail soon. However, it may very well fail without any notification/error at all.

Always, and I do mean always, have good backups.
 
it didn't predict me dropping my external HD (platter and arm , moving type) only 18 inches onto the floor , which put paid to the unit . I guess i could have got someone to take it apart and scrap it. If my filofax could talk , it would say "see i told you those modern gizmo's are risky" .
 
dropping my external HD

I can relate!

At the same time, as briefly mentioned in the article, I've got an external drive that's more than a decade old. It has been dropped numerous times - just never when the head was in motion or when it was powered up AND none of the drops have been all that severe - waist height at the most.
 
i'm really careful now and tend to use the SD card in laptop slot for backups , probably quite naively .
. I'm looking to get another external HD will read up which is the best bet - a moving disc and platter ( where it is not expected that it will be dropped) or a none moving SSD type.
 
These days, data storage space is absurdly inexpensive. I still have some spinning platter drives (useful for bulk storage) and have been mostly only buying SSDs lately. I suspect that, at some point, I'll be pretty much SSD exclusive.
 
ok i was leaning towards external SSD.

i'm guessing next article might be - your HD is failing what can you do ? ddrescue
 
No, the next article is an essay-format article where I try something a little different.

An article about data recovery is a good idea. I've done it before, so know a little about it. Good idea! I'll put it on the list of potential articles that I work from, among other lists. (I have a ton of notes from keeping notes over the years.)
 
Data recovery would be interesting to read ; not sure if i'm naturally pessimistic but what i tend to read up on mostly with Linux is about what do if things go wrong and have one or two options up my belt.

i'm half hoping something is going to go wrong with my Arch OS so i can tinker but unfortunately it has behaved impeccably.
 
Hmm... You could try getting JACK working, which might lead to your audio being so screwed up that fixing it is harder than restoring from backups.

I'm not actually sure how to intentionally break Linux long-term. I don't actually have any Linux problems and haven't had any in a long time. It 'just works'.
 

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