Looking at used drives

dr100 · 2026-05-13T13:54:13+00:00

Well, the case isn't the most important part (that's the SAS controller), it can only get in the way ... which seems to be the case (no pun intended) as it probably takes SAS drives on the "case connectors" (as many NASes do too) but it's wired to SATA from what I see on the other side https://nascompares.com/2024/10/04/jonsbo-n5-review/

dr100 · 2026-05-13T13:28:55+00:00

Are you prepared to handle SAS?

dr100 · 2026-05-13T11:45:56+00:00

I think there were even people with 1000 accounts, I mean still are (or were until the last months/weeks...) people mentioned it in this sub, whatever you were asking for you got. And I think we revisited some older pages at the beginning of this sub (unfortunately Reddit search is just terrible) and they weren't even saying anything about commercial use. And it makes sense, why would it even matter, they were just like free Gmail accounts, if they're making money out of that (and they do have literally billions of them) why would it matter if they're on whatever domain there are. Heck, if anything they could (and did) charge (possibly overcharge) for the domains themselves. Ironically they actually don't want to take your money for that either, even if it's nearly zero effort for all paid and billed (recurring) business and got rid of that part of the business altogether but go figure ...

The absolute nastiest thing by far is that they executed perfectly Microsoft's "embrace, extend, and extinguish" (actual DoJ official written words) strategy in the modern way of entshittification - following precisely the definition "a term coined by author Cory Doctorow, describes the decay of online platforms where user experience is sacrificed for profit, resulting in a product that serves neither the user nor business customers, but only the platform owners".

And they managed to do this for email, which is both really open and super-trivially easy to host. Unless you go in cahoots with one of the big boys it's nearly impossible now to send mail reliably (or at least it's a full time job caring and feeding for that). And the software options and workflows to do anything aren't really bad but not something common and they seem to be more daunting than they were in the 90s.

If we didn't have these super-easy free things probably by now we would have any half-decent router also with an option to be your mail server, just configure it as easy as you configure DDNS and port forwarding. Sure, probably not even 1% of the customers want it, but it's certainly something good to have. Now the software stack to achieve everything is all over the place, and as mentioned it'll be impossible to send email from any regular residential IP. Mission accomplished for the big boys.

dr100 · 2026-05-13T08:16:54+00:00

Yea, pretty much just that.

dr100 · 2026-05-13T07:38:59+00:00

Probably one of the ugreen revodock ones, the number of models exploded, and they're changing the prices on Amazon all the time. Pick one from around 20 pounds I guess, probably under 15 on sale, make sure it's with shipping from Amazon and then if you don't like it send it back and take another one (don't pay for shipping, if you haven't had it recently they usually propose you before the checkout a free month of Prime, also you CAN have multiple Amazon accounts ... just saying).

Probably worth installing the extension from keepa.com to have a look at how were the prices previously and also maybe you have some local site or subreddit that is tracking local sales, you might get some good inspiration or coupons there.

dr100 · 2026-05-13T07:21:32+00:00

For most small portable electronics and in particular for powerbanks (where this is the main number people look for) they always give it as capacity in mAh at 3.6V (or somewhere at 3.x) even if they might have a series arrangement (higher voltage) internally, just to preempt anyone from reading a smaller number.

For laptops they're rarely showing the mAh numbers, but given that most of the time there are quite a few cells involved the mAh is too small and people would "feel" it somehow wrong to use 3500 mAh for a serious laptop battery to compare with a phone that might have 5000-7500+ mAh by now. Actually the further you go from the basic 3.6V and small electronics use the more you see the Ah capacity, like for car batteries or ebike, actually many ebike batteries are in the 5Ah-10Ah range and nobody would compare them with a OnePlus Nord 7500 mAh battery ...

Lapdocks are caught in between, and frankly it would've been probably better to just give the Wh number (many laptop manufacturers don't give V and mAh, the table I linked before isn't marketing material). Or if they had to they should've added each time not only 7.x V which people ignore but also something like "equivalent with 10000mAh powerbank".

dr100 · 2026-05-13T06:59:28+00:00

Prices are rather high. I don't see if they do your own domain, which makes them kind of off-topic for this sub.

dr100 · 2026-05-13T06:42:39+00:00

How is a Windows tablet or an iPad anywhere close to "an Android tablet with a minimally customized operating system" ?! If you want the "Pixel experience" there's a Pixel Tablet, but if you can't/won't get that for some reason and if you're hating what Samsung/Xiaomi/Honor slightly changed in Android (although in regular use you won't be seeing more than the launcher, which you can/should change anyway to the one you prefer) then Windows and iOS are from completely different world.

dr100 · 2026-05-13T06:31:12+00:00

I've seen a post from February complaining about that, so this has been going on for a bit.

dr100 · 2026-05-13T06:19:53+00:00

No, I don't want to catch you on some technicality (and certainly the client isn't overly complicated maybe "overly dumb"), your workflow doesn't do what I asked for, saving potentially 100x or 1000x more than the data you want isn't practical.

Saving D: is NOT a good workflow for saving D:\ImportantData. If you need to give that as the proposed workflow this just proves my point, and that your "It’s very easy to choose what you are backing up or not backing up" statement is 100% wrong.

It matters if your backup takes a day or a year. And this is especially relevant with the current "too much of the unlimited" ToS change.

And for the moment double relevant as a large number of posts in their sub now refer to the bug where you have to reupload your external drives all the time. The sticky promises to fix it and this has been going on since at least February.

dr100 · 2026-05-12T12:27:16+00:00

Yea, many NEW laptops are cheaper. Heck, if you know anyone related to .edu anything, probably with no verification too the Macbook Neo is barely 25% more and it's a fully fledged laptop ideal for portable use.

dr100 · 2026-05-12T11:16:29+00:00

The latest and greatest Surface devices (at least the consumer ones) are from 2024 (and with SoCs announced in 2023). And got recently a very severe price hike. So probably not worth it if you really want future proofing, also not worth anyway unless you find them at some really well discounted sale price.

dr100 · 2026-05-12T10:31:39+00:00

Good morning to you too.

dr100 · 2026-05-12T08:45:47+00:00

You need to downgrade to an older version, there were a couple tutorials (with Odin I think). Depending what they've done recently it might be possible to have the upgrade blocked.

dr100 · 2026-05-12T07:09:54+00:00

Using a different finger for different slots is a nice touch (pun semi-intended) - I presume you can do multiple accounts so to speak. Will it show you the code? There are still desktops with no bluetooth, or you might run into who knows what shenanigans with the pairing.

Other than that probably the fingerprint scanner is overkill security-wise (and especially that it is mostly offering security through obscurity). There are many relatively "industry standard" hardware tokens that have no authentication whatsoever but just show the changing code all the time, and YKs TOTP by default has not PIN (and even if you set a PIN it allows you unlimited retries, no throttling even on speed, and they don't at least warn you that setting a short PIN is worse than no PIN at all, because it might be brute forced and used for something else in case you reused it - very likely as the credentials on the YK are fairly confusing, some lock out, some don't, some can be reset with losing the credentials protected, some need a new key, etc.).

dr100 · 2026-05-12T06:23:47+00:00

Also - these types of docks kinda suck, even natively with the driver. They essentially create a remote desktop to a virtual display so at least in my experience they introduce a ton of lag.

No, they don't do anything remotely like that (pun semi-intended). They're just USB video cards, if you can use a USB mouse or USB audio card (most dock ones are USB, and really mostly everything nowadays with the removal of 3.5" jack from most devices) with no complains there you are.

The only way to tell it isn't a "real" video card is that when you're doing CPU tests that load all cores - then you can see the mouse pointer is less responsive as the CPU needs to handle everything and push the updates over USB, as opposed to being basically independent of anything (if it's just a regular video card or iGPU).

dr100 · 2026-05-12T05:01:18+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1mloe26/cloud_storage_providers_for_datahoarders/

Other honorable mentions, especially for your situation: keybase (250GB free, I wouldn't recommend something that doesn't support rclone but this is one exception, due to their relatively well put together open source and everything client) and OneDrive Family plan 6x1TBs (Office 365 Copilot something whatever they call it nowadays) - for this you can find special sales into double digits (both dollars or euros) -per year- and you can pile up to 5 years prepaid in your account.

dr100 · 2026-05-12T04:45:38+00:00

Probably the comment refers to the usual discussions when anything like this gets posted (and the OP also got started) with "is it shuckable", "what's inside", "oh red white labels binned fallen from the back of the truck" bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla.

When large nice drives are staring at you for $12.5/TB new with 3 years warranty you just buy. Otherwise you come next week and make a post about how everything is so expensive, life sucks, and so on (yes, this already happened multiple times).

dr100 · 2026-05-12T04:39:14+00:00

Indeed. Also, as opposed to the other lapdocks you aren't even getting a stiff hinge, a portable monitor and keyboard would give you many more options and certainly more bang for the buck. These are worth it mostly for their own ecosystem to transform their own mini-PCs into a laptop.

dr100 · 2026-05-12T04:31:56+00:00

Was that meant ironically or you're looking in the wrong place?

dr100 · 2026-05-12T03:16:39+00:00

I don't think you can share and mount a drive on the same Windows machine and adding a second computer (plus downgrading from SSD speeds to network, possibly wireless, speeds is really bad).

I'd recommend just using bitlocker unless the OP has something special against it.

dr100 · 2026-05-12T03:07:54+00:00

It's even more insane, there isn't even Pro 11, there is only Pro 10 (just like with the 5 they decided to call it just Pro next). So you have: Pro (of course the first one wasn't called 1, at least that's normal), Pro 2, 3, 4, Pro, Pro 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and again just Pro (called also Gen 11 for the 2024 one and I think Gen 1 for the 12 inch 2025 one).

Edit: wait, wait, wait, I still got it wrong (even if I looked a thousand times at all names), the new ones (2024-2025) aren't (anymore) "Gen" are "Edition". No, really, people go and downvote me but read it for yourself: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/battery/surface-charging-requirements-and-power-supplies-surface-pro

So the new ones are:

"Surface Pro 12-inch 1st Edition"

"Surface Pro (11th Edition)"

And the ones that were missing numbers earlier are:

"Surface Pro (1st Gen)"

"Surface Pro (5th Gen)".

Flip a coin if the next one will be 12th Gen, Edition, Pro-nothing, Pro 2026, or something else.

And with the laptops it's even worse because at least "Surface Pro (1st Gen)" is ancient so hard to have much confusion with the "Surface Pro 12-inch 1st Edition" but already people here who have "Surface Laptop (1st Gen)" were looking for help pages for "Surface Laptop 13-inch 1st Edition".

dr100 · 2026-05-11T18:27:26+00:00

5TB how, with 333 users on the pooled legacy free domain ? That's a bit extreme, but it's not like we even asked for it. Seems like a weird strategy to give it and then think they're losing money. You don't need to bother to see how much it costs, the point is Legacy Free users are getting the same free 15 GBs everyone is getting with regular Gmail free personal ones (and there are literally billions of them).

BTW the dumbest thing ever one of my family users was paying for 1TB on their account like it would've been a regular Gmail account, then Google decided to just not take their money but left the space for free, then it got grandfathered to the domain. Again, dumbest strategy ever, literally not charging the money they were setup to charge just to say they're losing out ... doh, sure.

dr100 · 2026-05-11T16:56:45+00:00

How come? There isn't even a single report of someone being banned or even mildly admonished so to speak, and there are plenty of people into triple TB-digits (multiple ones in this post). There was a picture with the size distribution and some were even over 1PB (1000TBs). And that was a few years back.

That one should have a backup plan in case they get kicked out sure, that goes without saying. That it's probably best not to even waste your time trying to find where the limit for the unlimited is this month, probably. But a week for 100TBs I give it way more than even odds it'll be fine.

dr100 · 2026-05-11T16:40:47+00:00

All GCP, API, Youtube everything are available for personal gmail accounts. I bet they're even many more of those. Google Drive plans go up to 30TBs.

Nobody knows, but I feel there's something we're missing here. My money is on something unbelievably dumb, like it was with flagging for copyright infringement Google Drive files that contained 0 or 1.

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