If you've ever looked in your /etc/fstab file, you have may have seen an entry that looks like UUID=62fa5eac-3df4-448d-a576-916dd5b432f2 instead of a more familiar disk drive designation, such as /dev/hda1. Such entries are called universally unique identifiers (UUID). You can use these 128-bit numbers to make hard disk management easier.

Recent versions of Linux use a unique identifier for hard drives in order to make sure they get mounted to the same location all the time. If you've looked into your /etc/fstab file for auto mounting drives, then you're probably already familiar with the long character strings that are used for UUID's.

Storage performance has failed to keep up with that of other major components of computer systems. Hard disks have gotten larger, but their speed has not kept pace with the relative speed improvements in RAM and CPU technology.

You might have worked with Linux for years and never added an additional disk to your system or perhaps you were too frustrated by Linux’s strange ways of dealing with disks to attempt it. In either case, here’s your opportunity to work through the steps required in adding a new disk to your system.

Many people leave their computers on around the clock. This usually implies that all the attached hard disks are always spinning. Constantly spinning up a hard disk normally increases the chances of drive failure. When a disk is not powered it should last longer than if it was spinning.

Disk encryption is one method you may use to enhance the physical security rating of your computer. From my experience, it is rarely used, which is a shame because it is one of the most effective safeguards against unauthorized physical access to data stored on a computer.

The other decision I made was to remove the disk from the machine and put it in a cage and put the second disk in a cage as well. I then booted the diskless machine with a LiveCD (I used Fedora 14 desktop) and connected the disks.

eMount is a free system administrator tool for Linux which can mount, encrypt and manage disk image files and physical disk drives. It relies on cryptsetup which implements the LUKS disk encryption

This guide shows how to install and use the smartmontools package on Debian Etch and Ubuntu 7.10. The smartmontools package provides utilities to check hard disks for disk degradation and failure, using the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology System (SMART) built into most modern ATA and SCSI hard disks.