From: nospam@needed.invalid   
      
   On Sun, 7/27/2025 6:21 AM, Felix wrote:   
   > Paul wrote:   
      
   >> The hard drive has automatic sparing, which means if there   
   >> is trouble with a sector, the drive has some spare sectors   
   >> in the immediate area.   
   >   
   > that's good. is it solely a Linux thing, or windows also?   
      
   Automatic sparing on ATA drives (SATA or IDE) is a hardware-supported   
   activity. It happens no matter what OS is involved, it even   
   works for Macintosh computers :-)   
      
   >>      sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda   
   >   
   > how would I specify other than the C drive?   
      
   On Linux, the letter on the end is the drive identifier   
      
       Windows Disk0      Linux /dev/sda   
       Windows Disk1      Linux /dev/sdb   
       Windows Disk2      Linux /dev/sdc   
      
   Windows has Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc), while Linux has "gnome-disks".   
   Use the menu in "gnome-disks" to select a particular hard drive like   
   /dev/sdc , to show the partitions on it.   
      
   The Linux gparted utility, can also display disks in a format that   
   sort of looks like Windows Disk Management.   
      
   >   
   > so drives self test themselves and avoid writing to bad blocks making drive   
   testing somewhat unnecessary?   
      
   No!   
      
   Drives watch a sector that is being read, for symptoms that the sector needs   
   to be checked.   
   Sectors which you did not use a computer program to read, can remain   
   unverified for years   
   and years.   
      
   The SMART short test or the SMART long test, both of those complete too   
   quickly to verify   
   the entire surface.   
      
   Automatic sparing responds to sectors you are visiting at the moment. The more   
   busy a partition is, the more likely some of the sectors will be evaluated and   
   spared out if something is wrong with them.   
      
   But if you want to know the state of the entire surface, you run a thorough   
   surface   
   scan, which takes hours and uses an application program for the determination.   
      
   Take the following list of activities:   
      
      (1) Read the entire surface   
      (2) Write the entire surface   
      (3) Read the entire surface   
      
   Now, all the automatic sparing should be up to date.   
      
   >   
   > I  remember when a 25mb drive was huge :)   
      
   I was able to put two years worth of files, onto a 10MB drive.   
   That's how long it took to fill up the drive. The average file   
   size back then was 2KB, there were no picture files on the   
   disk drive, and the document editor was non-WYSIWYG and used   
   "format commands", which meant there was no bloat in formatted   
   documents either. It was certainly a different time, in terms   
   of what kind of files went onto a disk drive.   
      
      Paul   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)