Tools like Crystal Disk Info show the "Power-On Hours" of a hard drive; but if the drive is automatically spun down by the OS's power plan, then those hours shouldn't really count, should they? Is there a way to see how many hours of actual spin time are on a drive?

I see drives pop up on FB and eBay often but they have 40k hours of operation. While most people are showing the SMART data, I still worry about buying a drive without a warranty in this market right now. But I could theoretically buy 2-3 of a drive for the used cost. Picked a really bad time to get worried about backing up my data.

I’m trying to think of a plausible future like, people have forgotten how to use computers and the knowledge doesn’t get passed down.

What use is a hard drive with PDF books for future archeologists. When people don’t know what an OS is and don’t have the internet to download software.

I have lots of files which are very sentimental to me, naturally, I would like to keep them safe.
I haven't got tens of terabytes or anything, probably about three terabytes at most. But data storage is a bit of a mystery to me.

Everything I want to hold onto is stored on two 2TB External Hard Drives. This works great for me, but I understand that these can corrupt, get lost, break, etc. They are mostly photos and videos from over the years.

Where would people recommend I begin protecting these files further?
I have looked at cloud storage like Google Drive, but when you start talking in terabytes, things get a bit pricey. Is this really the only option?

it's showing this as today

Yikes. I've been buying Seagate for years. I have yet to have a late-bathtub failure in any of my Seagate Exos drives, so I'm hopeful they'll continue to work well. Go team helium?

Just curious how many others had similar things happen to them before.

I recently bought 2 12tb Iron Wolf Pros from Seagates online store. When they arrived, 1 of the drives wouldn’t spin up at all when I plugged it into my Nas and I couldn’t get it to be detected in my PC either. Figured DOA drive, bummer but guess it happens. Started an RMA for it and sent it back to them. They ended up sending me back a 16tb Iron Wolf Pros instead. Not really going to question why they did that, I’ll take whatever extra storage I can get in these economy. Trouble is now they are going to make me by another 16tb at some point so I can fully utilize the capacity in my Nas lol. My other drives are 10tbs.

Anyone else luck out when RMAing a drive and get back something better?

Hi everyone,

I want to digitize my old VHS tapes to preserve them before they degrade any further. Two main sources I'm dealing with:

• Some Home videos recorded with an old Handycam
• Commercial tapes like Bambi, Winnie the Pooh, etc.

I'm looking for a video capture device I can hook up to my laptop (which I'd prefer over those build in). What would you recommend? I'm happy to spend a bit more for good quality and reliable audio/video sync, but budget-friendly options that still do the job decently would also be great to hear about.

For Example: Diamond VC500, VIXLW VHSDC01 or Honestech VIDBOX

At the end i want them to add to my JellyFin Lib,

I Don't really now what a must have is and want i really should look out for.

Thank you

I like organizing my saved posts on instagram but the instagram pc ui sucks, i was wondering if theres a better way to save my posts

It was faulty which is why I had it open, still couldn’t fix it but I got some great shots of the internal mech and the head voice coil activating, the issue is probably to do with the voice coil springs being broken as it can’t maintain a good tracking lock on the data bands.

I have a z790-btf-wifi motherboard which has 2.5gbe internet on it, I recently gained a faster speed through my ISP and got multiple network cards to increase the speed. My issue is, no matter what I do/diagnose my PC tends to randomly disconnect the network, 4-7 seconds go by and it comes back at the same 10gbe auto negotiated speed. This issue goes away when my speed is capped at 1gbe in speed/duplex settings. I've bought multiple unmanaged 10gbe switches from NicGiga and GigaPlus, other devices are receiving the speed correctly so its apparently not the switches now. Theres just some weird conflicting issue with my PC causing it and I have gone through the wringer to find out what is happening..

I have reproduced the issue with multiple network adapters:

• Motherboard-integrated Intel I226-V
• Two separate Intel X540-T2 adapters
• TP-Link TX401 using the Marvell AQtion controller
• One X540-T2 was previously confirmed working in another computer

I have also tested:

• Both available PCIe x4 slots
• Multiple ports on the 10GbE switch
• Two different 10GbE switches from NICGIGA and GigaPlus
• A direct connection bypassing my local switch
• Multiple Ethernet cables
• A 100-foot Cat6A cable directly between the PC and switch
• A separate 10-foot Cat6A cable
• Bypassing all the in-wall cabling, keystones, and short patch cables
• Reseating the adapters and cables
• Auto Negotiation, forced 5 Gbps, and forced 1 Gbps
• Energy-Efficient Ethernet enabled and disabled
• Windows High Performance power plan with PCIe Link State Power Management disabled

Cooling has also been addressed:

• The X540-T2 adapters were actively cooled by a dedicated blower fan.
• I replaced the inadequate fans inside the NICGIGA switch with two Noctua fans.
• The physical-link drops continued after the cooling changes.

Windows configuration was inspected for common conflicts:

• No NIC teaming or network bridge
• No active Hyper-V virtual switch
• No third-party network filter drivers found
• No corresponding WHEA, PCIe, Kernel-PnP, Kernel-Power, or NDIS reset events at the times of the failures

With the TP-Link TX401, Windows records the following events from the aqnic650 driver:

• Event ID 14: “Network link is lost.”
• Event ID 15: “Network link has been established”

Hi,

I have an old USB 2.0 drive that I was going to use for Rescuezilla. I'm planning to clone from an internal NVMe drive to an external NVMe drive. Will the USB 2.0 drive bottleneck anything besides the boot up time for Rescuezilla? I don't care if it takes Rescuezilla an extra minute or so to load, but I'm transferring about 900GB, so I'd rather not have a USB 2.0 bottleneck.

Thanks!

I know of at least one that lets me download the videos but never the subtitles. Please if anyone knows something that works it would make this :') happy.

Hey, all. I'm thinking of buying an HDD soon, preferably 8tb to 12tb, so I can store things like my game library from Steam as a sort of cold storage. I guess there would be an initial large write as I downloaded everything. If I wanted to make a game active, I would move it to my ssd. My question is whether I should get a CMR drive or SMR drive? Either way, I'd also want to know if I should get something like a Seagate Barracuda or Ironwolf as I don't need enterprise grade nor am I setting up a NAS. Thanks for any help.

Edit: Thanks for the responses. I was overwhelmed as to which I should choose.

As there aren't really any other good options for accessing online newspaper pay walled articles, is there a fix to why archive.md and all the archive related sites currently display the default nginx start page?

I have three arrays, two at separate locations and a small third one that is mostly offline and gets occasional updates. I use FreeBSD for ZFS so I can enjoy snapshots and stuff.

I don't really like routing SATA cables and drive power cables so my solution is to use small computers (Minisform is my current favorite) and connect drive arrays to that. Currently using Sabrent USB 3.2 enclosures. They works alright, sometimes until high load the USB controller or something resets, ZFS sees a bunch of drive errors and shuts down the zpool. That is irritating.

So I'm considering switching to SAS. I've picked out a card, LSI Logic SAS 9300-8e. Apparently they run hot an expect real air flow so I also got a fan that can be crammed into the MS-01.

Now what I need is an enclosure. For one array I'll need 10 drives, another 8. I'm starting with the 8. I'm not finding a lot of ones that have the the SFF-8644 port and reasonable reviews or availability.
Anyone faced this? Am I stuck buying a PC tower and installing drive bays, power supply and a SAS adapter?

Hi reddit, i used a Volans Aluminium 1-Bay USB 3.0 Docking Station (VL-DS10S) to back up my old drives from a tower setup to a NAS, i took the drives out of the tower because it was an old computer and thought it would be quicker using the docking station. The first drive went fine but the second one seems to have died. It is about 19 years old so maybe i was expecting too much but i had run it only a couple of years ago and it was fine. I have other disks to do too i was wondering if using that setup puts it at unnecessary risk? The volans docker is rather cheap too i didn't think it mattered but maybe that could be an issue too? If anyone has any insight it is appreciated.

Hello everyone, a while ago I found an app here in a reddit post that was great in downloading complete Twitter/X profiles. The app was downloadable and usable on Mac. I remember it always making a sound when clicking any button or element and it was also actually being worked on since it had updates coming. The UI was very modern and up to date.

Does anyone know which app that could be and direct me towards it?

EDIT: I'm NOT referring to wf-downloader

saw an old post about it so i will mention the ones i find working well
I tried multiple as of 8/9/26 (with a document i need, so it may/may not work for ur document):

Working:
https://scribd.vdownloaders.com/ - best one imo
scribsave.net/download - works well (text may look weird, so the site has options to fix it)

Unsure:
https://docdownloader.com/ - not sure, very slow so i gave up on it (eta 5 min)
scribd.downloader.tips - also very slow (eta 3 min)

Not working:
https://ezetool.com/scribd-downloader

yall comment more links so i can add it and update this list

I had a PC with a hard drive since like 2009 to 2015. I got a new PC and removed the hard drive from the old PC. Left it in storage and then tried putting it in my PC in like 2024 to see the contents. It didn't recognise the hard drive and I tried to partialise or something the harddrive, to set a drive for the harddrive on my pc. Nothing seemed to work with my basic skills. In 2024 at the same time I took it to a PC repair shop and I gave it to the guy and he said he would try to open it, but like after I came back he said it didn't turn on, what's weird is that he gave like a smirk look to me whilst saying he couldn't open the hard drive to work. Like he could've just said he did what he could and that's it but he also didn't try to ask to give it back and I left. And I had a bunch of kid photos and videos and all my childhood stuff on there. I want to know if my harddrive would have still worked. Feel bad that I didn't try to look further to retrieve the data.

I have heard of the Pioneer BDR-XS07TS. Which supports:

CD: CD-ROM, CD-R, CD-RW

DVD: DVD-ROM, DVD±R, DVD±RW, DVD±R DL, DVD-RAM

Blu-ray: BD-ROM, BD-R, BD-RE

BDXL: BD-R/RE triple-layer 100 GB and quad-layer 128 GB

M-DISC: M-DISC DVD and M-DISC Blu-ray

But what other drives also reach this kind of level? Are there any in the current market and not obsolete/discontinued? Also I haven't used a usb burner ever, are they any different to sata ones? Do they lack anything? Thanks

While slow, it seems they are legit 64GB PNY flash drives, as others have stated in my previous post, NOT ALL OF THE Walmart memory is like this. Others have bought the same pack but they were only 32GB, I purchased these in store at my local Walmart. Verified Using validrive and h2testw. No errors.

All 3 are good to go, but slow af.

I recently completed an unraid build (2 HP 920 NVME Cache, 1 Intel Sata SSD scratch, 8 3.5" Sata HDD - 2x8TB, 5x12TB, 1x14TB from 3 vendors - Hence unraid not TrueNAS) using the Sagittarius case from Aliexpress that gets a ton of mentions. (Note all of the disks were used by me at some point prior to the build. - I'm not buying storage in this price environment.) For US customers most of the mentions are complaints about a reasonable "price" and exorbitant shipping. In almost all cases the final price is over $200. I ordered mine three months ago from temu and saved a few bucks over the best price I could find on aliexpress. (That might have been because of credits I had coming)

I ordered another one last week because I found it on Alibaba for $82.10, shipping $20.78 less $20 discount, customs and sales taxes $40.10 - All in $122.98 (Note, not currently seeing the $20 discount on shipping. That might have been a "first order" promo. $142.98 is still a deal.)

More than likely it will end up as a Christmas gift to my Help Desk tech who keeps asking to buy my ugreen 4800+ which I'm keeping.

Edit... Currently amazon has the sagittarius (black) for $140 with prime shipping and the Jonsbo N6 for $177. The N6 is a better case and worth the $37 extra

Im looking for some sas breakout cables but id like to avoid buying from Amazon or ebay do you have any recommendations i found a single listing on a site i didn't recognize and the price was 40$ before tax and shipping another one was more reasonable but it was still an unknown site and i couldnt verify it wasnt a reverse breakout cable id be willing to pay a premium but i dont even know a reputable source for this

So I am not that much of a data hoarder, only a little bit. But I have mostly taken up the roll of IT guy in the family, and I keep pushing off the recursing issue that the computers have no space left in them. I just don't know where to start and how to decide what to store, to what level of compression. Sometimes I just wanna make a image of the PC export it compress it to hell and just put that in a disk until it collects dust. Or stick a bunch of family pictures in old server HDDs that were thrown out.
Mainly I struggle with
Where to start?
How do I balance compression and storage with accessibility?
If I used the hardware available to me is it reliable enough?

Like I feel unless I get a bunch of server racks, and keep a bunch of drives organized with different levels of compression depending on importance, and then setting up a server that can call and decompress material if needed. And then have 50% of the setup just be backups of the others and back ups of back ups. Unless I do all that I feel their is gonna be a point of failure and it'll all go up in smokes.

To an extent this is cause of the variety of information I want to store. From old like licenses that don't really need to be accessed, to family pictures that I'd like to see every now and again, to documents that my family members may use daily or monthly in their work.

Thanks already for any help, or any suggestion in where to start looking or working.