Hi Peter, > > A manual `scrub' of a hard disk, using dd(1) to *read* all the > > > > sectors > > Now: what are the other features of DD? Can it be used to tidy up a > hard disk and make it respond faster?
No, nothing like that. http://catb.org/jargon/html/D/dd.html is a low level command that's just interested in shuffling blocks of bytes where it's told, perhaps altering them on the way. $ dd conv=ucase,swab <<<'hello world!' EHLL OOWLR!D 0+1 records in 0+1 records out 13 bytes copied, 0.000177398 s, 73.3 kB/s $ > When I open Chrome the HD thrashes around quite a lot before Chrome > comes up. It sounds like Chrome's multiple threads are clashing with one another asking for lumps of disk to be read or written and the rust drive is spending too much time moving its heads about. This seems to have a long history. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=176727#c176 A recurring theme there is deleting some or all of the `session' data that Chrome's holding so it doesn't have so much to peruse or housekeep. The easiest way to try might be any `clear your history' options it has. Cheers, Ralph. -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday, 2018-03-06 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread: mailto:dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk / CHECK IF YOU'RE REPLYING Reporting bugs well: http://goo.gl/4Xue / TO THE LIST OR THE AUTHOR
