IT/Hardware/Hard Drives

I like Samsung SSD drives. That's a full stop at the end of the previous sentence!

This is software for managing hard drives. It works well for Samsung SSDs

You will need to install smartctl which comes in the gsmartcontrol package. It is no longer standalone.

The most important piece of information is the Total Terabytes Written. Find with the command below.

sudo /usr/sbin/smartctl -A /dev/sda | awk '$0~/LBAs/{ printf "TBW %.1f\n", $10 * 512 / 1024^4 }'

The graphical tool gives you Total LBAs written. Take that number and divide by 2,000,000,000 to roughly get TBW.

You can expect 75 to 300 TBW on a 1/2 TB (512 GB) drive.

This is when for some reason you can't or don't want to clone the partition.

rsync -avP --numeric-ids --exclude='/dev' --exclude='/proc' --exclude='/sys' root@failedharddrivehost:/ /path/to/destination/

These are many and this is just one.

Common error:

wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdc1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error

When a drive gets confused about its hibernation state etc.

sudo ntfsfix -b -d /dev/sdc1

here -b stands for --clear-bad-sectors and -d stands for --clear-dirty

this should fix it.

Contents