WD hard drives jumper settings and SATA 1.5 Gbps limit

Hardware   / / / / / Leave a comment

Hard disk jumpers where a necessary nuisance in the IDE/(P-)ATA days. Jumpers made the difference between a functional and a non-functional hard drive.
Fortunately, they disappear in the S-ATA age. Well, almost… While totally unnecessary nowadays, jumpers are still needed to fiddle modern S-ATA drives to make them compatible with some early SATA implementations motherboards.

Using dd to repeatedly erase a specific range of sectors on the hard disk

Linux   / / / / / 1 comment

I recently needed to erase a specific range of sectors on a hard disk that had developed bad sectors. And I needed to erase them repeatedly, to make sure the remaining sectors in that area are stable.
This is were the dd tool comes in handy: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda seek=START count=SIZE bs=1M
For example…