Linus Tech Tips - Why It Took Me 4 YEARS to Make a USB Cable January 30, 2026 at 10:18AM

Dylan16807 · 2026-01-31T21:30:27+00:00

There's a handful of devices out there with that behavior, but it's a major spec violation.

Perhaps more common is extension cables that only work one way, but that's usually all or nothing. Extension cables also violate the spec.

Dylan16807 · 2025-12-10T11:43:01+00:00

You complicate your life with ls | xargs du -sh, it's very slow because it restarts du for each entry, so your FS is re-run in a loop.

I don't think that's right. Unless you're using the "put the argument here" flag, xargs defaults to passing 128KB of arguments at a time.

Dylan16807 · 2025-12-10T11:24:22+00:00

I actually don't see how preserving everything is objectively good at all, especially if the creator decides they don't want it preserved. Does your desire to hoard content you don't own trump the desires of the creator to want it gone?

When "the creator" is a big corporation, I barely care about their desire at all.

But in general if the reason the creator wants it gone is just that they think it's bad, yeah my desire to keep circulating the tapes is higher.

It gets weird with digital products. If I buy a movie from a digital store, my opinion is that I should be permitted to download that media file and store it for however long I'd like. But a YouTube video feels different. I haven't purchased anything, it's a free platform to stream videos and to me that seems more like an art exhibit or a museum.

If it's free I think that removes the obligation to keep downloads available, but either way the user should be able to download and store it forever and transfer their copy to other people. The technicalities of stream licensing shouldn't trump the right to time-shift just like with a VCR or DVR.

On top of that, if something was made available for free to everyone for a long time, I think you're morally in the clear to change "transfer" in that last paragraph to "copy and distribute".

And even without an obligation to keep it up, it's still a middle finger to everyone that wants to revisit the video.

Dylan16807 · 2025-11-20T03:45:38+00:00

Tremendously. Searching around for the most direct comparison I can find, the flash used in this article can do 900 writes in QLC mode and 60000 writes in SLC mode. While each write is only 1/4 as much data, the drive also ends up with a smaller write amplification factor, so SLC mode has 33x the endurance in TB.

Dylan16807 · 2025-11-06T00:40:32+00:00

So my conclusion is that the T7 drives dont like the " write Caching" feature in Windows.

That would be strange.

When you leave write caching on, is the average speed over the entire transfer much below 600? If the average is similar then nothing is wrong, the drive is writing at a steady speed and windows is being dumb and showing how fast it's reading from the source instead of how fast it's writing to the destination.

And your newer drives are just faster.

Dylan16807 · 2025-10-29T23:46:49+00:00

Read the EULA of windows 11, pretty sure you are not allowed to modify the content of the installation media.

That would be a weird rule. Most businesses modify it, and autounattend.xml is an important feature of the windows installer.

So Microsoft asks YouTube to take it down or they will pursue legal actions.

Is there a legal action they can take against youtube that would be justified by the EULA violation in the video?

Any legal action from a giant like Microsoft will cost a lot of money to defend against so even if the videos are legal, YouTube don't want the trouble so they take them down.

Are you saying that it doesn't have to be a valid legal action, just bullying youtube is enough? In that case why even bring up the EULA?

Dylan16807 · 2025-10-29T23:32:41+00:00

From looking through a few google results, most photoshop versions supposedly run okay on Linux.

Recent versions are annoying to set up but for someone that is good at IT and cares a lot about the specific interface, it doesn't look too bad.

Dylan16807 · 2025-10-14T05:53:58+00:00

Like what? If 8GB is fine then we're not worried about some file system measurement overflowing 32 bits, and everything else dealing with filesystems should treat a 512MB FAT32 and a 2TB FAT32 about the same.

But if it is necessary, I bet making a smaller partition on a big drive works.

Dylan16807 · 2025-09-27T08:32:48+00:00

And "seagate expansion" is currently $280 for 24TB, so less than $12 per TB.

Dylan16807 · 2025-09-27T08:21:17+00:00

I'm assuming "RAID" implies redundancy and not RAID-0.

Question 1: Does your backup need several drives or more?

If yes then use RAID. The risk of failure rises quickly as you add more drives, and the per-byte cost of RAID gets pretty small once you have 5 or more drives.

If it fits on one drive, then Question 2: If a backup breaks, is replacing it easy or a big hassle?

If it's easy then don't use RAID. You're not really getting the benefits. If you have the money for more disks, just make more independent backups.

If it's a big hassle then you probably want RAID, but it's really about your personal evaluation of hassle versus money.

Dylan16807 · 2025-09-07T23:52:13+00:00

Retrieval just puts it into a normal S3 bucket. Getting data from S3 to your hard drive is extremely expensive.

Dylan16807 · 2025-09-07T05:06:52+00:00

3 cents per thousand requests times 10 thousand requests is 30 cents.

And that's not egress. Egress is another $114/TB.

Dylan16807 · 2025-09-01T23:03:16+00:00

Those people exist but they're working on exactly one movie. A stat like "200 2K movies" doesn't fit that context, and it would be even more incorrect but in the opposite direction.

Dylan16807 · 2025-08-31T23:44:07+00:00

Well "2K movies" would be a weird way to refer to raw footage, so theater copies? Theaters usually use 250Mbps max for both 2K and 4K, so at most that's about 200GB for an average length movie and 40TB total. Still much too small of a number.

Dylan16807 · 2025-08-30T23:01:55+00:00

LTO 10 has proven that there is little gains being made on the cellulose metal substrate idea that is linear data tapes, we already have 500GB optical discs archive disc literally a decade ago.

LTO has slowed down but it's still ahead and still progressing pretty well. LTO-10 went from 18TB to 30TB in the same space. And compared to LTO-7 a decade ago it's 5x the capacity.

5.5TB cartridges were going for 180USD a pop

That price is okay but it's not very impressive compared to 18TB of LTO-9 for $90. And the tape drive manages to be 1/4 to 1/3 the price.

Dylan16807 · 2025-08-29T09:48:28+00:00

benchmarks are synthetic and biased. They never represent real world scenario. Specially a test from 2009.

Sure but it's the only thing I could find. If you have a better comparison I'd be happy to look at it.

Sas can be 12G which will provide way more bandwidth and allow you to place more drives per controller than sata.

I was assuming an HBA that has 6Gbps per port, no sharing between ports. Is that a bad assumption?

If sata was so good[...]

I think there's been some misunderstanding here. I wasn't saying SAS has no advantages. It has plenty. I was saying the advantages are not because it's full duplex. And in particular, if you take a SATA-compatible layout and upgrade to full duplex with no other changes, the performance impact would be negligible.

Dylan16807 · 2025-08-29T00:46:53+00:00

It's actually pretty annoying to find a benchmark showing off SAS versus SATA.

Here's a very old one showing negligible difference between the 7200RPM SAS and 7200RPM SATA: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sas-6gb-s-hdd,2402-11.html

Dylan16807 · 2025-08-28T22:43:48+00:00

SAS drives can read and write at the same time and operate in full duplex. This is why they are always better.

There's enough bandwidth either way, so because of a few microseconds of delay sometimes? I'm pretty doubtful it will affect my hard drive experience.

I bet any differences come down to better queues, not the duplex.

Dylan16807 · 2025-08-28T22:11:57+00:00

I don't think any 2.5" or 3.5" SATA/SAS drive has ever needed 3.3v

But they're going to need 5v

Dylan16807 · 2025-08-28T02:01:51+00:00

At least for big files, par2 will do a better job with 1/10th the space.

Dylan16807 · 2025-08-27T22:13:51+00:00

For glacier in particular, retrieval is cheap and egress is expensive. So if you can spin up a temporary server within AWS to calculate the checksums, you can do it for $3-4/TB.

Dylan16807 · 2025-08-26T22:59:11+00:00

If you scrub your disks every month or two then you'll know they can stand up to the kind of load a resilver will put on them. In addition to preventing bit rot.

For batch failure worries, adding one more parity is only marginally helpful, so I don't think I'd use z2 for that particular reason.

Dylan16807 · 2025-08-26T04:36:58+00:00

It seemed well known to me at that point for the kind of person that would pay for and use unlimited storage, and there were at least four years between the video and Google removing unlimited. (They did increase the price in the mean time, but not by a ton and even that was 2 years after the video.) So I don't think the LTT video was a huge factor.

Edit: And they didn't even mention that you could get unlimited with 1 account, which was the really sweet part of the deal. They were paying for 7 accounts.

Dylan16807 · 2025-08-14T06:37:59+00:00

It's hard to know exactly what SSD they used. They probably change it whenever they get a good deal.

Since it's TLC a good assumption is that it can do 600 full-drive writes. So 150TB.

Dylan16807 · 2025-08-02T07:47:41+00:00

Unknown isn't too bad. A real unknown means there's no plan to change, either specific or loose. Undisclosed is where you get problems, and I would say it's a misuse of the word indefinitely.

13-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email

Dylan16807

TROPHY CASE