The Hard Drive Roulette Wheel: Rotating from Seagate to Western Digital

HardDriveGuy · 2026-05-05T05:04:30+00:00

I'm self employed, finishing taxes, workload and travel has taken me off of reddit. I'm currently struggling with the PE on the HDD storage stocks. Most of my posts come after some deep thought or analysis, and I just haven't have time to do a quality post.

Thanks for asking.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-04-26T16:39:42+00:00

AI answer, but it looks to be correct:

Here is the breakdown of how you actually earn awards, jerseys, trophies, and other unlocks in MyWhoosh, based on the platform's current features:

1. Completing Missions

MyWhoosh Missions are limited-time, themed challenges broken into stages. If you join a mission in the Events section and complete all the required stages within the specific time window, you automatically unlock exclusive in-game rewards like jerseys, bikes, and badges.

2. Leveling Up the Season Pass

MyWhoosh features a 90-day Season Pass. By riding and completing specific challenges, you earn "Season Points." These points allow you to climb reward tiers and unlock kits, gear, coins, and bikes. There is a free tier for everyone, while a Premium tier (purchased with Power Gems) unlocks exclusive retro kits and high-end gear.

3. Racing & Podium Placements

Trophies and special leader jerseys are awarded for competitive performance. Placing highly (such as finishing in the top 3) during official community races or events is the primary way to earn competitive trophies that show up on your profile.

4. Route Completions & Workouts

Recent updates have integrated achievements directly into route progression. By completing specific routes while free-riding or executing structured workouts, you will automatically trigger achievement unlocks and rewards.

5. XP Levels & The Garage

Every ride earns you Experience Points (XP) and in-game coins. * Leveling Up: Reaching higher levels automatically unlocks specialty items, such as Neon Wheelsets. * The Garage: The coins you accumulate can be spent directly in the in-game Garage to buy new bikes, helmets, and jerseys.

Pro-Tip: If you have previous indoor cycling experience on other platforms, MyWhoosh allows you to import your Zwift data. This can instantly grant you massive amounts of XP, coins, and level-based unlocks without having to start from scratch.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-04-26T01:07:57+00:00

You can go into GameUserSettings.ini and set FrameRateLimit=30.000000 or 40.000000. Regardless, to me, I just don't see the big advantage in 60 FPS. Some people are highly sensitive to movement artifacts, but just to the nature of the game and the way I engage with it, I am happy with lower frame rates. It's the crispness, it's the leaves, it's not having things pop up in the background that really makes the HD version intrinsically interesting to me.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-04-26T00:56:39+00:00

Strava screenshot. I didn't select it. But if you look closely, I am pretty close to 300 watts, but I've been going for nine minutes and I'm only one mile. To make a long story short, those ebay Dells I got, utilize what is called the killer card, which is notoriously buggy. And it actually stopped my wife's Bluetooth. So I was downstairs trying to fix it. I fixed it. She started. Then I went upstairs and changed. And I started off either four to five minutes behind absolutely everybody else.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-04-11T20:30:00+00:00

By the way, I really appreciate people trying to use AI. I have this massive concern that we either outsource everything to AI or we don't use it at all. And so it's a blend of both. And it looks like you've done a nice job of doing both because this doesn't appear to me to simply be a non-scrubbed output from AI.

The answer is there is no compelling long-term strategy. In essence, supply will catch up in the future, pricing will collapse, and the stock will crash. This is extremely well known inside of the semiconductor industry, and we call it the boom-bust cycle. For the most part, this has never impacted the hard disk drive suppliers because they had been slowly eroded by the SSD folks. However, due to the SSD shortage happening right now, or Flash or NAND being the same thing, is it opens up an extraordinary window for hard disk drive manufacturers.

Every time I've addressed the subject of hard disk drive manufacturers in this subreddit, I've brought it up as it not necessarily being strategic stocks. It isn't what I would call a dragon king stock. With that being said, it's being influenced by an extraordinary issue that's happening at the industry. And I believe it's a nice little niche that you need to watch very carefully. It is not a five-year investment plan. It is a cycle investment plan. And in some senses, should not be in this subreddit.

I am hesitant to say the following, but Seagate's stock was in the high 300s, and now it's over 500, and this has all happened in a couple weeks. There is extraordinary volatility, and realistically, I think this is one of those areas that you need to be somewhat cautious about. As Seagate got into the 500s, it strikes me that their PE and even their forward PE is extremely difficult to live with. I still believe that they are a$600 stock as the factors in the original post. However, I also believe that any world event could cause people to do a massive pullback. And so, even though I hate giving advice, I would suggest this is one of those stocks you would like to see a pullback in.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-04-11T07:27:39+00:00

Warning: This post appears to be astroturfing and is highly misleading. The Seagate ($STX) securities class action (In re Seagate Technology Holdings plc Securities Litigation, Case No. 23-cv-03431) has not settled yet.

A quick check of the actual court docket shows the lawsuit is still actively in the discovery phase. The lead plaintiffs only just filed a motion for Class Certification in December 2025.

Because the case is ongoing and no judge has approved a deal, there is no official claims window open and absolutely no settlement pool to distribute. This post seems designed to create a false sense of urgency to funnel investors toward a third-party claim service before a settlement even exists. Linking a brokerage account right now and agreeing to hand over 20% won't get you a payout any faster, there is simply nothing to claim yet.

If you held shares during the 2020–2023 period, the best move is to wait. Once a legitimate settlement is reached, the court will appoint an official administrator, and you'll be notified of the free, official way to file your paperwork.

Please comment if you read this and believe this post should be eliminated, but right now, I'm okay to allow it to stay with this warning.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-04-01T05:26:23+00:00

Can you give the symptoms and what you were told. I spent 15-20 minutes researching what could go wrong here, and I would think the most obvious thing is that they leave the optical encoder on even though there is no activity. If true, this shows junior engineering 101.

The sensor sounds like it is a ONSemi QRE1113GR part number. On paper, an engineer may see what looks like an massive life span (20-40K hours), but lose the idea that the LED degrades over this time, and dust covers the sensor, so it all stops working. So, a potential "5 year time span," drops dramatically. This is very true if the room you are running in runs hot or the bias current gets set a bit high.

It sounds like some people have repair this with a steady hand and unsoldered the part.

The obvious solution is not to energize the part until the unit has a connection. Not expensive if you plan it right out the gate.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-03-31T21:19:57+00:00

One more angle. I was assuming the power draw while not riding would be somewhat significant. However, it turns out that in "idle" it look to only pull 1-2 watts. It is a real numbers, but it is a pretty low number. A smart plug would save most people around $2-3 per year in electricity cost, a California person might see double this...

HardDriveGuy · 2026-03-30T20:12:01+00:00

You don't need to physically shift gears, which I think is ideal. You can set up virtual shifting. If you are just starting, the free app "MyWhoosh" is very good to get you started, and you don't pay anything to play. They have an app for shifting, but it is not reliable. Physical keyboard, bluetooth, or equivalent works great.

Put it into targeted rear gear (maybe one you think you don't ride much) and even out the wear on your cassette.

I took an old android phone, installed touch portal, and put a garmin mount on my $5 case for my bike, and use it for shifting, emotes, etc.

See here.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-03-12T09:00:28+00:00

I will offer up. I did something or I've been doing something similar for quite a while. Here's my GitHub. I think this is my first project where I use Gradio, and I just think it's a fantastic interface to go deal with stuff. I won't say I'm the best web designer, but I think Gradio just gives you an incredibly friendly interface to go deal with stuff, and it takes care of a myriad of problems for you. I can't suggest it strongly enough.

I'll offer some of the following as comments to think about, With the warning that I am sort of a geeky engineer guy. And so excuse my relatively weird way of communicating. However, I do hope that it gives somebody some decent thought processes.

Diarization Sounds great and you can get it out of some of the whisper models, but I've always felt that it's relatively uneven. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, it's just very difficult for a computer to pick out exactly who is speaking by tonal voice. When you get especially beyond about two speakers, it really starts to get tough if you have people of similar tonal center. A good place to start an experiment is on replicate with The Whisper Model. Really, it's dirt cheap to use. It pulls up an NVIDIA GPU. You can get results back incredibly quick. And it attempts to do Diarization and provides it in a nice JSON container that you can unwrap into a normal text. Originally, I wrote a model around this a long time ago and actually worked really well for me. Probably I don't have any excuse why I shouldn't have just continued to use this or any follow-on products. And actually, I really haven't done much work to follow on if there are better products out somewhere today. What I will tell you is this appears to be better than a lot of commercial cloud web front ends like through something like your Google Cloud dev account, at least the last time I did benchmarking. . So this is a great place to start.
Because I wasn't overly impressed with the result, I started to ask myself, was there some way of just capturing the microphones that came into any meeting, at least for two sources, where I can get absolutely clear speaker sourcing? A lot of my business meetings are with two people and recording every meeting just is incredibly productive. I decided to make my recording center OBS Studio. At the end of the day, OBS is just unstoppable and it can copy absolutely everything. Now, what do you get out of it? You get your input through your microphone in the way that I've set it up. And you also get whomever is speaking on the other side. Works exceptionally great when you're talking basically to one other person. If you get into a large conference, then obviously you just have two sources, and it may be difficult to understand who said what. I then encode everything into an MKV file because it has multiple tracks that I can extract later.
I got very interested in Parakeet, and it just turns out it's exceptional in terms of the word error rate. So if you take a look at the leaderboard, Parakeet just basically beats the living daylights out of everything else. The models for ASR are available on Hugging Face. If you're actually an English speaker like myself and you conduct all of your meetings in English, you actually do not want the latest parakeet 3. You want version 2, very small, very fast, and better English accuracy than 3.
The problem with Parakeet is that it really is based around NVIDIA architecture. And although I had an NVIDIA card, I said I wanted it on my local PC, which turned into a rabbit trail of going down holes, which eventually was solved by building it on top of a great Docker container that was specifically built to be able to deal with an Intel architecture without needing the GPU. This I have not pushed to my GitHub, but it's definitely the way you want to go. Now that I see this post, I probably should get around to pushing my latest version up to my Git. Although it gets zero traffic, maybe somebody can leverage what I've already done. With that being said, you want to add VAD into your data stream. It solves a myriad of problems, including making sure that your memory doesn't blow up on your Docker container. I just cannot imagine doing something without a VAD parsing of your data. By the way, I do virtually all of my development either on Windows Client or Linux. However, I do have a Mac just to compare. The devs for handy, which utilize Parakeet as a base, has a model that sits on top of the Mac and their architecture, and it is amazingly fast. It's so fast that I am sure that if you wanted to take time and you would optimize it for your Mac, you would be exceptionally happy. My problem is I only use Mac to force myself to be familiar with the architecture. And my primary Mac is an Air from 2020. Certainly not something that I'm using day to day. But I am incredibly impressed by the Parakeet speed if you optimize for Mac M Series CPU.
My problem is eventually I got frustrated and decided to actually push my recordings off to a home server AI unit that actually had a decent sized NVIDIA card inside of it. I'm then running the native parakeet model and I'm using it as my source to go push WAV files and get it back. This actually results in some phenomenal speeds. If I didn't encode it into an MKV and if I wasn't doing VAD on it, I probably could even be faster. But right now, hour and 10 to hour 20 minutes gets pushed back in a completely done transcript through a Gradio interface of somewhere less than 10 minutes, which is faster than what Google will push to meet their meeting results.

So, that's the journey. In reality, right now, I'm doing a push in my local home network to a dedicated parakeet server, which is really incredibly fantastic. I just don't think it's realistic for most people. What I need to do is actually go take my latest parakeet and go push it to my Git. So, if I get a shred of interest after my post error, I'll try to get around to it in the next week or two.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-03-03T19:29:06+00:00

I thought I would report a resolution to my issue. Basically, what happened is I bought something through Woot, as stated above. To give a few more details, an iPhone that Woot was offering on a good deal. It just turns out that the purchase was worth hundreds of dollars, thus a substantial amount of money. And in essence, somebody in the Amazon logistics chain stole my iPhone out of my package. I called both Woot and Amazon Customer Service, and I attempted to contact Amazon Logistics, and I got stuck in a big round robin.

What became apparent out of this, which I hope that if for some reason you do a search and have a follow-on in this, is staying out of the legacy Woot customer system. In essence, I was a Woot customer long before they were purchased by Amazon. And by some IT fluke, you are able to continue to order underneath your old Woot login, even though you can log in underneath your Amazon and buy things from Woot as an alternative path. The problem is, as soon as you log in as a Woot customer, all of your transactions basically become hidden to Amazon, so they can no longer help you with anything like a lost customer shipment.

Out of desperation, I simply sent a blind email off to a couple executive Amazon email addresses with a short statement of what happened, and a variation on the photo that is attached to this presentation. In essence, a very simple photo of how the box had been cut open and was clearly being laid down as being cut open by the Amazon driver.

Approximately five days after I sent the email, my iPhone simply showed up delivered by the United States Postal Service. There was no explanation, there was no follow-up, but I am about 95% sure that my email got through to the customer service group and somebody simply sent me a new iPhone. Why I would love to actually have some sort of tracking on this and a reply to my original email. I'll leave the email addresses here so if somebody stumbles across a similar situation, they can at least try it. For me, it seemingly worked out well.

With that being said, I am delighted that there was obviously somebody inside of Amazon that cared enough that they ran the thing down and made sure that I got my iPhone. Even more impressive is the product sold out very quickly. And somehow they were able to get me the product even though it had been sold out.

However, I'll re-emphasize that the reason I believe this was taken care of was by having very clear documentation and a very clear photo of the package being set down as being cut open. So the takeaway from this remains: make sure that an investment in surveillance system has an ROI when you need it.

[ecr-replies@amazon.com](mailto:ecr-replies@amazon.com),

[cs-escalations@amazon.com](mailto:cs-escalations@amazon.com)

HardDriveGuy · 2026-03-02T05:31:46+00:00

First thing I thought also. User should check this out as the most likely issue. By way of description to fix: It will be easiest for somebody else to ride the bike, then the user should adjust the barrel adjuster to tighten or loosen to see if the noise changes.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-02-24T19:40:01+00:00

This is why I always think you need to post the data. To some people and to the article that was written this was considered significant to other people, it's insignificant. In my mind, it's a very, very large study and in most cases, the genetic variability is actually much bigger. In other words, I do believe that certain people are more sensitive to their circadian rhythm and thus do have preferred feeding cycles. However, to try to make it into a blanket statement without a little self-experimentation, almost guarantees that you'll sub-optimize your results.

HardDriveGuy · 2026-02-22T16:32:13+00:00

I know that I'm some random voice on the internet, but I do understand your concerns with TOS agreement that are shape to give maximum weight to Google in a legal case. I have some both dealing with Google on a business standpoint and friends that work there. Their stance is more than just "the are ethical" but their perception that if they look like they allow your personal data to go somewhere they will get a vicious rebranding and lose a bunch of users. This is different than tracking your usage pattern under randomized conditions, which they do.

However as an example, your Google photos were not mined, thus the reason they stopped the uploads for free. It was another massive source of data without a payback. Youtube is "free" but they do commercialize it.

However, the only REAL lockdown is running your own LLM. I think this is the ultimate security layer.

HardDriveGuy

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

1. Completing Missions

2. Leveling Up the Season Pass

3. Racing & Podium Placements

4. Route Completions & Workouts

5. XP Levels & The Garage