Disk paranoia — noun — That occasionally well-founded sense of creeping dread one feels when repartitioning, reformatting, or clearing a USB drive. The dread stems from the fear that one is not, in fact, doing something terminal to the correct drive and you’re actually zorching one of your internal drives (usually the one with all of your data on it). This leads one to recheck the terminal window once every nine or ten seconds to make sure you’re messing with the correct drive. This may also include opening multiple other terminal windows to display the list of currently mounted devices, cross-checking the output with the disk manipulation command you’re running to make sure you got the right one, and scrolling back to re-re-re-check earlier diagnostic output.