39
How is it possible to partition a HDD without corrupting its contents?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
39 points (93.3% liked)
Linux
48173 readers
854 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
I think the idea comes from "HDD slow," as he was impressed with the speed it was happening at, especially if you think of it as requiring data to be moved around on the disk. It's not really intuitive to think of it as just a table on the disk somewhere that says which regions belong to which partition, and having those regions be anywhere on the disk.
Is that actually how it works? I thought that was only within the partition itself, while partitions are physically separate on the platter.
For SSD's, it's 100% a logical table, because data is stored all over the place for load balancing purposes, so it already uses a logical table to keep track of what each block is for at any given point in time.
For HDD's, historically they were physically separated, and they mostly are still, but there's still a logical table, and there's no reason the logical table can't say "Blocks 0 through 1234 and 2000 are part of partition 1" if you have something somewhere else that you want on that partition.