David Orlo .com | Tag Archives: Hard Drive

Hard Drive Bible Notes

Posted on October 6, 2014 by David Orlo

Never install 7,200 RPM drives as OS or Database Drives Never create a 3 Drive RAID 5 (Even with 15k Drives) Never create a 4 Drive RAID 5 with a host spare (This is a 3 Drive RAID 5) Never create a 4 Drive RAID 5 with 10k or 7.2k Drives Always opt for 3.5” drives over 2.5” drives (3.5” 15k drives cost the same as 10k) 5K Drives are 10% faster than desktop drives, 0K drives are only 0% faster Always add all Disks to your RAID then create LUNS to partition the data IOPs = ((RPM/1000)/(Latency*Seek))*SPINDLE COUNT

Resize Partitions when a server is out of space

Posted on May 19, 2014 by David Orlo

This is a quick guide to resizing partitions when a server is out of space and has multiple partitions on 1 hard drive. First verify the amount of free space on the separate partitions that exist on the hard drive you would like to resize. As you can see here the D drive has plenty of free space that could be used on the C drive. This is a very common scenario on servers such as Dell when they are purchased with Windows preinstalled. I have no idea why Dell thinks this is acceptable and I’d like to know where

Macbook Pro Unibody Hard Drive Disk Activity Light – MOD

Posted on March 18, 2012 by David Orlo

Recently I started to run low on space so I decided to buy a new hard drive and although the speed increase from the faster drive was a nice bonus I still felt like something was missing, oh thats right an HD ACTIVITY LIGHT APPLE! I can see Steve Jobs making this call while saying something along the lines of it distracting from the cleanliness of the design and he probably called it an obsolete feature stating most disks are constantly active with modern search indexing and background tasks blah blah, I obviously don’t agree with this and many others

SAS/SATA LSI Hardware PCI-e RAID under $50

Posted on March 16, 2012 by David Orlo

SAS/SATA LSI Hardware PCI-e RAID under $50, say what? Yes its true and I will show you how. Recently I was shopping for some Raid controllers for our Dell PowerEdge 2950’s at work which typically use a Dell PERC 5/i or you can outfit them with something better but I was looking for the OEM solution. I was hunting on eBay when I started to notice most of these cards where under $50, in fact I purchased 3 of them for $35 each. If you don’t know already a Dell PERC 5/i is nothing more than a re-branded LSI MegaRAID

Slow Disk to Disk File Transfers (Caching)

Posted on March 14, 2012 by David Orlo

Recently I ran into an issue that I would like to share with you and it had to do with slow file transfers. To make a long story short I am upgrading my server which has a RAID 5 and I am replacing the onboard RAID with a hard controller. To do this I am going to need to back up all my data on the RAID Array but this is where I ran into an issue. When I would transfer files from the array to one of my non-array drives I would receive 40-50 MBps sustained writes on one

iMac 2006 Core Duo to Core 2 Duo, Memory, Hard Drive Upgrade

Posted on February 18, 2012 by David Orlo

Yes you can upgrade a weak old Core Duo iMac into a decent performing modern machine that will support the latest Mac OS and if your interested, allow you to program for the iPhone and iPad. Note: this isn’t for the faint hearted and later when I have more time I will revise this posting with more detail and I will break out the images from the gallery or add captions to the gallery photos to give a better understanding of what is going on in each photo. The first thing you need to do it open up the iMac,

WD VelociRaptor vs. WD 2TB Black vs. WD 1TB Black vs. 2x WD 1TB Black Raid 0

Posted on November 5, 2010 by David Orlo

I currently own the following drives so I decided I would put a few arguments to rest and lay down some facts with proof. 1x WesternDigital VelociRaptor 300GB 1x WesternDigital Black Edition 2 TeraByte 2x WesternDigital Black Edition 1 TeraByte Test Box Processor: AMD Phenom II 965 BE Motherboard: MSI 870A-G54 Memory: Adata DDR3 Raid Controller: Onboard AMD SB850 Taking a random guess I could tell you before any testing that the WD Black Raid 0 configuration will be fastest Burst and Sustained speed unless the controller is holding the drives back. I was amazed at the jump in speed