hdparm - how to secure erase SATA SSD over USB

I have been following this guide on how to secure erase an SSD (trying to improve the performance of mine, which currently only writes at about 30mb/s seq).

However, I'm using an USB-->Sata docking device to avoid having the harddrive frozen. Apparently using this solution the SATA device is recognized as a SCSI drive, which is giving me trouble.

I use the "hdparm -I /dev/sda" command with those parameters, and I get the error;

HDIO_DRIVE_CMD (identify) failed:
Invalid Exchange

After a lot of googling on the issue I can't seem to find anyone who has actually solved this problem. However, I have not tried to just go ahead and use the secure erase. So I'm not sure if this would actually still work.

I would love any and all input I can get on this, especially on whether it will still work to do a secure erase with the drive being recognized as a SCSI drive.

The drive itself is a Samsung 256gb SSD (pm800), I'm sure you can understand my reluctance to go through this procedure without feeling reasonably safe that I won't mess it up beyond repair.

shutdown - Make windows 8 install updates when shutting down without disabling fast boot

TL;DR: Scroll to the bottom bolded part

When logging in to my Windows 8 PC, there's a yellow message like this:

Windows Update

Your PC will restart in 2 days to finish installing security updates.

Sure, update notifications.

I'm a long time user of Windows, having used it from 95 (although I don't remember much from that period). XP, Vista, and Win 7 all exhibited the following behavior:

• There are updates.


• I don't care about them.


• When I leave work, I initialize shutdown of my PC.


• Windows installs the updates and shuts down my PC.


• When I get to work the next day, it has to spend maybe 1 extra minute to finish up.


• I can get back to work.

Windows 8, instead, decides to not install updates during shutdown. Apparently shutting it down and booting backup isn't a restart. Weird terminology they're using there.

Thus, with windows 8, my process is as such:

• There are updates.


• I don't care about them.


• When I leave work, I initialize shutdown of my PC.



• Windows shuts down my pc.


• When I get to work the next day, I boot my pc up.


• Windows sees that it's automatic restart time, and spends 2 minutes or so installing updates.


• Windows then does a hard restart.


• After booting, windows finalizes installation of the updates.


• In these 3 minutes, I've mentally labelled my workstation as "unavailable" and gone off to do semi- or non-work related things (talking to co-workers, getting drinks, toying around with my phone...)


• When I get back to my workstation, 10-30 minutes later...


• I can get back to work.

So I google and find out this "not installing updates on shutdown" is due to fast boot.

I like fast boot and don't want to disable it. I don't want to do a cold hard shutdown every time I leave for work if this makes booting the PC slower. I can probably wait the extra 10 seconds, but ideally, when I shutdown my PC, it either installs updates via a full shutdown, or it does a shutdown for fast-boot.

---

How can I configure Windows 8 as such that it will, on shutdown:
if there are no updates, do a shutdown with fast boot - if there are updates, do the full shutdown? Even better would be if it did the full restart and did a fast shutdown afterward, that'd make my boot process take the same time, regardless of whether it needed any updates.

hard drive - Reinstalling OEM Windows 7 Without Original Disc?

My grandfathers 2 year old Dell laptop recently suffered a hard drive failure. I purchased a replacement hard drive and installed it for him.

Unfortunately no Windows disc was provided with the laptop. But there is a Windows 7 Home Premium license key printed on the case. I have a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium so I used this disc when reinstalling and it accepted his license key.

A few days later it started giving an error saying the installation is not genuine. I've contacted both Microsoft and Dell support, each is passing the blame to the other.

Was wondering does anyone here have suggestions for how to reinstall and activate OEM copies of Windows 7 without purchasing a new license?

Thanks

memory - Lots of DDR2 and older CPUs or small amount of DDR3 and a newer CPU?

Building a new desktop PC, for some gaming and lots of Virtualization, I have come across a nice old machine I can use. It has two CPU slots populated by dual core AMD Opterons, and 16Gb of DDR2 RAM in 8 dual rank DIMMs.
My current machine only has 4Gb 800MHz DDR3 RAM, and a single quad core (core2quad) CPU.

Windows 7 x64 internal user experience benchmark shows pretty much the same figures, except for the aero estimation at "1" for the AMD machine.

I'm wondering how I can decide which machine will be better for both purposes, the main question being whether more RAM at a slower pace can perform better than less, but faster RAM.

EDIT: The main question here is not what I am going or not going to buy, I already have both of the machines, but only one can stay.

What I'm trying to find out is whether the extra RAM can compensate for the slower CPUs (and the fact they are on two sockets, which means extra context switch lags), when it comes to modern games. And the games are nothing too fancy, all I'm looking for is for COD and Assassin's Creed (and that's mostly it) not to lag when set to medium settings, with a 450GTS or 9600GT GFX card (which I already have, and need to decide where it will go).

Thanks for the virtualization pointers, but it's a bit offtopic here since I'm well aware of the different aspects of virtualization, I'm asking in this forum and not in SF because my experience with desktop/home/gaming hardware is ~5 years out of date, and that is where I'm looking for advice.

Answer

Getting virtualization and gaming into one thing is not that easy.

For Virtualization, you need a lot of CPU cores (if your workload is very CPU dependent) and a lot of RAM, in contrast to gaming where you need less cores, which on the other side need to be faster and you also don't need as much RAM as virtualization.

Concerning the RAM speed, the answer is that it doesn't matter, see this link.

To make a conclusion, if you do let's say max 2 virtual machines at a time, you better go with the fast CPU and ~8GB of RAM.
However, as your dual core opterons are probably very old, any new CPU will be faster, so the best thing would be to just buy a CPU (sandybridge quadcore) and 16GB DDR3 RAM as RAM is really really cheap these days.
With that machine you can play games(don't forget a good GPU) and do virtualization.

If you don't want to replace your current PC then keep the C2Q and buy another 16GB of RAM (4 DDR3 RAM modules).

How can I enable a Windows-like, full-system encryption under Ubuntu?

I switched my OS from Windows to Ubuntu. On my Windows system I had my whole laptop encrypted so no one could access anything without the correct password. Now I have Ubuntu and TrueCrypt won't let me encrypt my whole system. I considered encrypting my whole C drive, but that wouldn't work, would it?

What are the Linux alternatives for full system encryption like the Windows version of TrueCrypt has to offer?

Answer

If you truly want full disk encryption, you will need to install from the Ubuntu Server or Ubuntu Alternate installer. In the partitioning section, you can select full disk encryption, using LVM, dmcrypt, and LUKS.

However, the Ubuntu Desktop graphical installer supports total encryption of your entire home directory by clicking a single checkbox. When you select your username and password, you'll have an option to "require a password to login and access your home directory contents." This is a very easy, seamless approach to cryptographically protecting the private data you store in your home directory.

This is only necessary for Ubuntu Versions <=12.04. Beginning with 12.10, Ubuntu shipped a new option with their graphical installer which allows easy full disk encryption.

mac - How do I decide between CPUs with different clock speeds, number of cores and L3 cache sizes?

I am a web designer and I'm considering purchasing a Mac Pro (one of the new cylindrical ones). I've scoured the internet for information on the different processor options that they offer, but I'm not really sure what will best suit my needs. I'm looking for some clarification on the advantages and disadvantages of a CPU with a higher clock speed (3.5 MHz) and lower cores (6 core) VS. a CPU with lower clock speeds (2.7 MHz) and more cores (12 core).

Here are the options right off of Apple's site:

When comparing processors with different clock speed, number of cores, and L3 cache size, which one should you choose and why?

Answer

The difference between those CPUs is not just in the L3, each step up has more cores, and more L3 to share cache between them.

Basically more cores and especially more L3 cache will mean better multi-threaded performance. Note that this is not the same as but is related to multi-tasking.

Video processing, especially transcoding one format or one resolution to another, is a task that can almost always benefit from more CPU cores. Especially in programs that lack GPU based video decoding and encoding or for systems that have a GPU that has relatively poor performance. A large L3 cache would allow a bigger segment of data to be brought onto the CPU, for the multi-threaded encoder to then work on in parallel. The clock speed might be slightly lower for more cores, but the overall work throughput could be much higher due to having more cores and a larger (faster than main memory) cache to store a good amount of data in.

In order to objectively assess what you are going to buy you need to work out what tasks you are going to use it for and find out if they are capable of being split across multiple cores.

Graphics design/manipulation can also probably benefit from multithreading as it is generally a large amount of memory merging and manipulation through filters, convolves and other effects. A well written application would probably make good use of more cores and the net gain per core is probably a lot higher than the net loss in terms of CPU frequency.

Tasks that can generally benefit from more cores (to my limited knowledge) include:

• video transcoding (i.e. converting from mpeg-2/DVD to mpeg4 or similar)


• batch audio processing



• software compiling


• 3D CAD (to a certain extent)


• Graphic design


• scientific data processing (big data sets, same process to be run across them all)

Tasks that are more memory than CPU bound, therefore cores/cache are less important:

• browsing the Internet (lots of tabs)



• social media

Tasks that generally work better with faster cores (but >2 cores definitely helps):

Heavy mutitasking, such as having a lot of applications loaded, will depend a lot on the type of tasks you want to keep running and whether they are actually doing something. If they are sitting in the background but not actually working then you want more memory, if you want to work on something else while another task is "doing it's thing" in the background, then the CPU will matter more.

How can I Install a fresh copy of Windows XP or windows 7 into USB flash

How can I Install a fresh copy of Windows XP or windows 7 into USB flash drive or a USB external Hard disk & use it independently in any PC & Laptops???

Thank you