I was curious how much data I’ve had on my computer network over the span of its existence, so I decided to plug a few data points into open office in order to visualize it. This is what I came up with. I started when I got my first personal computer, a monster of a laptop that had dual hard drives, totaling 100GB of storage. I also had a 120GB external hard drive connected to my first Linux server, and then later attached a 160GB internal drive to it as well. Two 500 GB hard drives later I had a server crash, which caused me to lose just over 1TB of data. I jokingly refer to it as “The Great Server Crash of 2007″. Ever since then I always buy hard drives in pairs. One for actual data storage and the other for backup. If it hadn’t been for that crash, the trend line would actually be really accurate.
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Computers
Data, hard drive, server
I was wondering if there was a way to monitor hard drive use in a terminal the same way it is possible to monitor CPU and RAM usage with top. After a quick search I found a post on the OC Forums that suggests install sysstat, which does exactly what I want. Installation is simple:
sudo apt-get install sysstat
Then run the utility with:
iostat
You can also set it to automatically refresh by putting the number of seconds to refresh in after the command. For example, to refresh every five seconds, type:
iostat 5
Computers, How To
command, hard drive, iostat, terminal
After coming back from a geek get together and swapping some videos and linux distros I’m getting close to filling up a 1TB hard drive. In order to more streamline the upgrading of my backup hard drive for the coming upgrade, I’ve purchased a dual 3.5″ SATA external enclosure that has plenty of space for another terabyte of data. As of this writing there are only 30GB to go, which I can easily fill up with my HD video camera.
Computers
full, hard drive, hdd, SATA, terabyte