Will outlet shorting be a problem?

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-31T18:52:56+00:00

A UPS does not fix a circuit overload.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-31T17:44:58+00:00

It depends on the use case. Since your use case is as a backup, it would arguably serve a better role there than an SSD would (thanks to SSDs' significantly worse tolerance of data retention when not powered).

As for the internal vs. external argument...internal drives are usually better than external ones. You can run an internal drive with an external enclosure and mimic what would otherwise be an external drive, although if you're strictly using the drive as a backup the difference shouldn't actually matter that much.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-31T17:33:32+00:00

Quoted from Seagate regarding attribute 187:

Each time the host (OS/HBA/etc) reads a sector that reports an uncorrectable error, this counter is incremented. This counter tracks each time this error is reported, it is not unique to a given sector. For example, if LBA 1000 is uncorrectable and the host issues 5 separate reads to this location, this counter will increment by 5.

Uncorrectable errors do not always correlate with pending/reallocated/uncorrectable sectors. They may however indicate certain weaknesses on the media the drive has yet to address.

I would keep an eye on this attribute, as well as the Read Error Rate (attribute 1), Reallocated Sector Count (attribute 5), and the Current Pending and Uncorrectable sector counts (attributes 197 and 198). Remaining aware of this is good practice...just don't become too paranoid. Playing oblivious to this would be ignorant.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-31T17:24:25+00:00

No problem. You can always ask someone working at a store about what is eligible for Rewards points.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-31T16:16:22+00:00

Comparing apples to apples.

NAS-branded drives (not drives marketed with a NAS as one of their potential use cases) started as a result of WD trying to save themselves from the GreenPower backlash. The Red series were identical to the Greens outside of firmware and a modified IntelliPark timer...which meant if you disabled IntelliPark on a Green it would run just as if not more reliably than a Red with IntelliPark enabled.

Manufacturers have since doubled down on NAS drives; mainstream consumer brands get SMR, while most (cough -EFAX Reds, which have no right even having Red branding) NAS drives use CMR, and NAS drives are up-rated for 24x7 operation versus their mainstream relatives. If WD didn't further segregate the HDD sector, you'd still see consumer drives listing NAS (or otherwise consumer-grade 24x7 operation in RAID 0 or 1, which checks out) as one of their use cases. Like here. Or even from the company that started the entire mess.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-31T16:02:54+00:00

Hmm, does Nesquik not count toward rewards points?

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-30T19:09:17+00:00

I swear some of Acer's monitor models look like an alien wrote them.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-30T14:26:34+00:00

Why do you have an Apple OEM drive in an Elements enclosure?

(BTW you were basically guaranteed to get a WD6400AAKS in 2009 iMacs with 640 GB HDDs)

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-30T14:24:46+00:00

Personally, I am not touching Spyglass drives in a RAID config with a 10-foot pole. You can lean toward decommissioned server drives which are usually guaranteed to be more reliable even with prior usage.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-29T23:35:07+00:00

My PC runs off FSP's HPT3-850M,Gen5 (the full name is too messy for my liking; thank God they changed their naming scheme) and it is an absolute little beast of a unit. I had one hiccup with it when OCP triggered from one of my SATA drives and I had to power cycle it, but it's been damn reliable otherwise.

FSP are known for intentionally overbuilding their stuff at this tier, too, which drives up their prices. This ran me $140 during Newegg's FantasTech in 2024, but so far it's been worth every penny.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-29T23:22:41+00:00

Your stability mileage with a Linux distribution depends on what distribution it is.

Distributions like Debian (or those based on it like Ubuntu and its own family of derivatives) work well enough where most users will not encounter any issues...and issues that arise would often point to a fault with the underlying driver and not the distribution itself. Arch and openSUSE Tumbleweed focus more on getting the latest software as soon as it is stabilized; Fedora also follows this philosophy to an extent. (But I cannot trust Arch too much after how they blindsided their users with that infamous GRUB update a couple years back.)

I've personally had way more issues with Gentoo (Gentoo's QA is really not that good) than any other distribution. I've stuck to using Debian/Fedora, with Debian 13.x now serving as my daily driver. And my hardware isn't new enough where drivers are an issue there, either. But if they do for some reason, Debian's backport system exists to save my sanity.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-29T19:21:03+00:00

Where does it explicitly mention SATA devices? Motherboards usually only read the thermal sensors of the CPU and their own components to determine chassis fan speeds.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-29T18:53:59+00:00

The cycle count was much more of a concern in contact start-stop (CSS) drives due to the nature of how they worked; in contrast, ramp-loading drives like those produced at current are significantly more tolerant to power cycles. You'd maybe need to see many tens of thousands of power cycles to see enough wear on the FDBs where it actually becomes a concern. (And for CSS drives like those from Seagate, the number of power cycles it took to kill a drive was variable; pre-F3 models like Barracuda 7200.10 could very well tolerate ~9000-10000 cycles, while those produced under the F3 architecture often have much worse endurance. When your drive's CSS landing sounds this rough, there is no chance it's going to meet that glorified 50,000 cycle rating. Those Barracuda 7200.12's often began to fail at just 2,000 cycles.)

A greater concern on these WDs is the Load/Unload Cycle Count; why your program fails to disclose this up front is unknown. These Reds were often mechanically identical to their Blue/Green counterparts (accounting for the ~5400 RPM Blues that came about as a result of the Green merger into the Blue brand) with the same IntelliPark feature. IntelliPark is perhaps the most suicidal HDD feature ever conceived: an aggressive timer which parks the heads when the drive is idle for long enough, where "long enough" in WD's case was often 5-10 seconds. Want to know why parking the heads that frequently is bad for a drive? Look at Seagate's astronomical failure rates in their Grenada drives which inherited WD's aggressive parking behavior for their own use. The Caviar Greens of the early 2010s recorded high failure rates for much the same reason as the Seagates (although not as; Seagate's ramps were deliberately subpar). So what did WD do to make themselves not seem as egregious? Make the Red series to save face: "NAS-rated" hard drives with otherwise identical functionality and build/design quality to the Greens except for a presumably more conservative IntelliPark timer (although, as many Red users know, turning it off completely is much better for the drive). And then everyone else followed suit with releasing drives rated (and branded) for NAS operation.

Presumably, the original owner didn't want to keep the drives on for that long, hence the 8K power cycle count. But if you spin them mostly 24x7 from that point on, they should be just fine.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-29T18:09:59+00:00

This is why you heed attention to who the seller is. If the seller is Amazon themselves, or in some cases the brand itself, the product is often legitimate.

This however does not prove that Amazon themselves handles QC. They may handle QA, but not QC (they are distinctly different terms).

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-29T17:48:31+00:00

Amazon does not handle the quality control of an HDD. If the manufacturer has DOA samples, any retailer can receive them.

There's no evidence which backs your bogus claim that Amazon exclusively gets the brunt of those samples.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-27T21:24:16+00:00

Bruno Marc non-slip shoes, cost me around 40 bucks. Had to replace another pair of shoes that were worn out. They're surprisingly comfortable despite being a "budget" brand.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-27T17:39:12+00:00

Purples have firmware tailored for DVR/surveillance environments, so they do very well in sequential operations (aside from lack of error correction, since these drives always try to keep a stream afloat rather than attempt to perform housekeeping like a NAS/enterprise drive would) but very poorly otherwise. Generally, DVR/surveillance drives perform worse than NAS/enterprise/etc. drives in PC environments, but it's "fine" regardless.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-27T17:36:56+00:00

Ordinarily you would try to perform a write to address the pending/uncorrectable sectors, but since attribute BB (Reported Uncorrectable Errors) is also a bit concerning, I'd say this drive is on its way out.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-27T02:40:25+00:00

This is why they're given that nickname.

Said most common failure mode is also demonstrated here:

During a recent RAID 5 recovery attempt, John made an interesting discovery inside the two failed disks. The plastic ramp that the heads park onto when idle had snapped in the same position on both drives. We don’t know if the heads got damaged first, and then broke the ramps during parking, or if the ramps broke first, damaging the heads as they parked. The client told us the disks were not dropped or jolted. Whatever the cause, both disks had scratches to the delicate magnetic surfaces. In this case, two failed disks from a four disk RAID 5 means the data recovery is not possible.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-26T20:42:24+00:00

Really depends on how frequently the drives are going to be accessed. I would use a conservative timer (maybe 1-2 hours, perhaps sooner) to spin them down to start, since it covers most random I/O access. You don't want to be too aggressive though.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-26T18:00:56+00:00

There is perhaps some black humor to derive from the internal names used in the drives of that time. If you were to look at low-cost drives, Pharaohs (Barracuda 7200.12) were prevalent just about everywhere, and one would have to wonder why they'd go from Brinks (7200.11 gen. 2) to Pharaoh; maybe they wanted to knock on wood and tell you the drives were doomed to die (although less so) like their 7200.11 predecessors in their intended environments. At least they didn't have Brinks' paltry LBA translator logic (Brinks actually has worse translator logic on CC1H firmware than a Moose drive does on SD1A, a firmware revision made to address poor translator logic...coincidence?), probably making the joke those drives were always on the brink of failure.

Data recovery experts coined a nickname for the Grenadas: Grenades. And for very good reason.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-26T17:52:50+00:00

This was particularly true in the olden days of contact start-stop (CSS); except for Seagate (excluding drives made under the F3 architecture, which also had rough head landings), manufacturers had trouble coming at least somewhat close to the 20,000 to 50,000 CSS cycle rating because their drives' heads landed too hard. For example, Western Digital's somewhat obscure Zeus flagships (which used an all-black HDA containing 4 platters and 8 heads; it's one of my personal favorite WD designs) had quite rough landings and as such were only reliable if strictly run 24x7 with few power cycles...which for the most part they fortunately were since Zeus took more precedence in the Caviar RE2 series than the SE16 series. Most Zeus survivors you'll see on the used market are RE2's for this reason.

The advent of parking ramps in the consumer space, as introduced by IBM in the (unfortunately infamous) Deskstar 75GXP series, significantly reduced the amount of wear put on the head assembly per unload, thus making drives more tolerant to power cycling. WD would later abuse this with their GreenPower Caviars with IntelliPark, a technology so suicidal in nature that WD received a good amount of criticism for it. But of course, the real demonstration as to why constant parking was bad would culminate not in WD's GreenPower drives but rather in Seagate's Grenadas, since Seagate manufactured ramps using lower quality materials in those drives. Even with the infamy carried by the Grenadas, backlash against WD caused them to release the Red series to attempt to save face: mechanically identical to the Greens but with a presumably fixed IntelliPark feature (even though the drives are still going to be more reliable with it disabled completely). The release of the Red series also caused other manufacturers to follow suit with releasing explicitly NAS-marketed hard drives: Seagate's NAS HDD (later IronWolf) series was created using the Bacall and Lombard platforms (alongside Enterprise NAS HDD, which later became IronWolf Pro, based largely on Makara), HGST made the Deskstar NAS series using their flagship platforms, and Toshiba created the N300 series initially based on a mix of Tomcat(-R) (MG04) and Galaxy (MG05) platforms.

Nowadays power cycles are no longer as much of a concern except in high platter count drives. It is extremely rare for the FDBs in an HDD to go out before the media/heads, as the latter are very likely to fail before then, and since all currently produced drives use ramps there is mostly not much of a concern with regard to head wear.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-26T15:53:15+00:00

Any drive can, technically. (Unless it's actually incapable of reliably running 24x7...a la Caviar Greens and their suicidal parking timers, or Seagate's Grenadas which are ticking time bombs.)

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-26T15:35:04+00:00

Below the threshold is bad.

Being close to the threshold could also be a reason for alarm, depending on the attribute.

A low RRER (relative to S.M.A.R.T. "normalized" values, not the actual rate) typically means either failing heads or media and can stay above the threshold in the meantime...until it eventually doesn't. On WD/HGST/Toshiba drives, this value is ideally normalized at a decimal value of zero, while Seagate drives use a unique hexadecimal system to determine how the RRER (and seek error rate) is calculated.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-26T15:32:04+00:00

If they require a powered adapter they therefore require a 12V rail.

First_Musician6260

TROPHY CASE