hard-drive

I want to access the whole hard disk directly from a C program. There's no FS on it and never's gonna be one. I just want to open /dev/sda (for example) and do I/O at the block/sector level of the disk. I'm planning to write some programs for learning C programming in the Linux environment (I know C language, Python, Perl and Java) but lack confidence with the Linux environment. For my learning purposes I'm thinking about playing with kyoto-cabinet and saving the value corresponding to the computed hash directly into a "block/sector" of the hard disk, recording the pair: "hash, block/sector

How can I get the serial number of a hard disk drive using Python on Linux ? I would like to use a Python module to do that instead of running an external program such as hdparm . Perhaps using the fcntl module? Linux As you suggested, fcntl is the way to do this on Linux. The C code you want to translate looks like this: static struct hd_driveid hd; int fd; if ((fd = open("/dev/hda", O_RDONLY | O_NONBLOCK)) < 0) { printf("ERROR opening /dev/hda\n"); exit(1); } if (!ioctl(fd, HDIO_GET_IDENTITY, &hd)) { printf("%.20s\n", hd.serial_no); } else if (errno == -ENOMSG) { printf("No serial number

I'm getting ready to release a tool that is only effective with regular hard drives, not SSD (solid state drive). In fact, it shouldn't be used with SSD's because it will result in a lot of read/writes with no real effectiveness. Anyone knows of a way of detecting if a given drive is solid-state? Detecting SSDs is not as impossible as dseifert makes out. There is already some progress in linux's libata ( http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Kernel/2009-04/msg03625.html ), though it doesn't seem user-ready yet. And I definitely understand why this needs to be done. It's basically the