In the world of data storage, hard drives play a crucial role in maintaining the integrity and accessibility of your data. However, hard drives are not immune to failures, and monitoring their health is essential to prevent data loss and ensure smooth operation. The smartctl command, available on Linux systems, allows users to monitor and… Read More »
There are different tools to manage storage devices on Linux. One such commonly used tool is the parted command utility. It allows you to create, extend, and delete disk partitions on storage devices. Parted command offers several benefits over other partition tools, such as fdisk, when it comes to managing disk partitions. Some of its… Read More »
One of the most common Linux operations is locating a particular file by its name. In Linux, the ‘locate’ command serves the purpose as it is used to search a file or a directory by name. It is similar to the ‘find’ command, which locates the file in the filesystem. But here, it searches the… Read More »
This article explores the ‘blkid’ command, whose purpose is retrieving information about block devices, LABEL, UUID, file system type, etc. The useful command can help us to identify or troubleshoot issues related to block devices and their attributes. Installation To use ‘blkid’ command, your Linux system needs to have the ‘util-linux’ package installed. blkid: command… Read More »
Some time ago I had purchased a Seagate One Touch 5TB hard disk, and used it mostly for redundant backups and virtual machines. Suddenly a week ago I noticed that it has stopped working and plugging it into the usb port brought up nothing in the file manager. I tried plugging it into different usb… Read More »
Intel Quick Sync Video is the technology used in intel integrated gpu’s to enable hardware accelerated encoding and decoding of videos. It supports multiple codecs like H.264(avc), H.265 (hevc), MPEG-2 etc. In this quick tutorial we take a quick look at how to use this technology inside ffmpeg to encode and decode videos. Install non-free… Read More »
RAM Speed (read and write) is crucial to the overall performance of the system. Having a fast cpu but slow ram can slow down a system in demanding work-loads like video editing and gaming. Ram size and speed are different factors. Ram size determines how much data can be stored in the system, whereas the… Read More »
OpenCL is a general purpose computing api that is designed to be hardware accelerated with a supporting gpu and driver. On Linux this api is supported by all major gpu vendors including nvidia, intel and amd. In this quick tutorial we take a look at how to check if your system support opencl api (with… Read More »
Disk I/O speed is an indicator of how fast the system and read/write to the disk. Usually nvme ssds are the fastest and hard drives and external usb flash drives are the slowest. There are many commands that can be used to benchmark the performance of storage disks on linux. For e.g. sysbench, dd and… Read More »
Vulkan API is the successor of OpenGL the cross platform api standard for hardware accelerated 3D graphics. It is a cross platform alternative to DirectX which is windows specific only. All major gpu vendors including nvidia, amd and intel provide vulkan support either through their own drivers or via the Mesa graphics library. In this… Read More »
The decode-dimms program from i2c-tools package can be used to extract spd information from the ram modules which provides details about the module including the timings, clock speed, internal layout of the memory blocks including rank and bank count. The command can be installed with the following commands: sudo apt-get install i2c-tools sudo modprobe eeprom… Read More »
In a previous post we already discussed about UEFI and BIOS and how the boot process work with each of them. Now in this post we shall take a look at the partition table formats, namely MBR and GPT. They basically define data structure formats that hold partition information on the drive. Without the partition… Read More »
IndigoBench IndigoBench is a free and simple tool from Indigo Renderer that uses OpenCL api based library to render graphics using gpu acceleration. It renders an image and then calculates a score based on the performance. This score can be compared with other users in their online benchmark database. This tool is very simple and… Read More »
Kubuntu / Ubuntu 23.04 I am running Kubuntu 23.04 with Plasma desktop. You can check your ubuntu version with the lsb_release command: silver@ubuntussd:~$ lsb_release -a No LSB modules are available. Distributor ID: Ubuntu Description: Ubuntu 23.04 Release: 23.04 Codename: lunar silver@ubuntussd:~$ The interesting thing this time is that kubuntu has been installed on an external… Read More »
Un-allocated space is that disk space which is not inside any partition and is lying free. This space cannot be formatted to a file-system without first creating a partition in it. In order to use the space in unallocated space, you must either create a new partition in that space, or merge the space with… Read More »
Sysbench is a command line utility program available on linux that can be used to conduct different types of benchmark tests to measure performance of disk io, memory, cpu and mysql database. In another article we learned how to use sysbench to . In this particular article we take a quick look at how we… Read More »
USB ports and devices come in a variety of speeds like USB 2.0 (480 Mbps), USB 3.0 ( 5 Gbps), USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) and so on. When you connect a device to your system on a usb port for the purpose of data transfer (for example an external ssd or hdd) you… Read More »
Ram timings are technical specs about ram modules that are installed in laptops or desktops. These number indicate the performance of the ram module interms of how fast they can read and write data. The appear as 4 number set separated by a hyphen, for example like this: 16-16-16-39. Now these numbers tell us how… Read More »
The 7z LZMA benchmark runs dummy compression and decompression tasks to measure the overall performance of the system. It reports measurements in MIPS (million instructions per second) which give an idea of the computer’s raw processing power counting all factors. 7z LZMA compression is a multi-threaded work-load. This means that it can utilise multiple cores… Read More »
Sysbench is a command-line tool that is designed to test and benchmark database performance, but with certain options it can also be used to run tests to measure the raw performance of cpu, ram and storage devices as well. These tests can give a brief and fairly accurate assessment of the system’s performance. In this… Read More »