Hard drive RPM

[Norberto Meijome]

On Wed, 19 Sep 2007 17:47:19 -0700
jekillen <jekillen at prodigy.net> wrote:

> Is there a utility for measuring the effective RPM of a hard disk?
> A software tackometer?

not sure, ultimatebootcd , as it has been suggested, may have some answers. For
reference, just get the drive model and get the full specs from the
manufacturer's site. 
You can also peruse hardware testing sites such as toms hardware and others for
tests on that particular drive.

> I have one that was expressly advertised on the package to be
> 120 Gb capacity, and in fact only 111Gb are available for storage.
> That is a 9 Gb discrepancy. A Fire wire drive I have is also designated
> as 120 Gb and actually only has 117 Gb usable capacity.
> Like 9Gb is enough for several operating systems. 3Gb is even
> enough for an operating syste

Advertised sizes are for unformatted media. Each filesystem will use different
amount of physical resources (sectors in the disk) to hold its metadata, so
that will of course vary. I suppose you can always use the disk in raw ...
using dd or some other clever tool you may devise... :D let me know how it
goes :)

you may be able to increase the amount of available space (of course, depending
on the filesystem used) by modifying the block size, but that will usually
affect the number of total inodes (or equivalent in NTFS / others) available...
man tuning should have a section on this, as well as your filesystem of choice
documentation (eg, man newfs in BSd, man mk* in linux , NTFS docs @ MSDN )

B
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{Beto|Norberto|Numard} Meijome

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