I have a Samsung laptop (Chronos s7) with one SATA hard disk on bus ata:1, which is detected as /dev/sda, an 8G SSD on ata:2, /dev/sdb, and various other devices on the rest of SATA interface.
In Windows, if you type LIST DISK using DiskPart in a command prompt it lists all physical storage devices, plus their size, format, etc. What is the equivalent of this in Linux? Answers: Thank you for visiting the Q&A section on Magenaut. Please note that all the answers may not help you solve the issue … Read more
I want to know whether a disk is a solid-state drive or hard disk.
A file that refers to a device. A block special file is normally distinguished from a character special file by providing access to the device in a manner such that the hardware characteristics of the device are not visible.
I have a card reader attached on /dev/sdb.
I previously used to create image files using dd, set up a filesystem on them using mkfsand mount them to access them as mounted partitions. Later on, I have seen on the internet that many examples use losetup beforehand to make a loop device entry under /dev, and then mount it. I could not tell why one would practically need an image file to behave as a loop device and have its own /dev entry while the same behaviour can be obtained without all the hassle.
From reading this, it seems that when copying data to a different hard drive, cat automatically uses the optimum block size (or very near it).
