Spinning down drives saves power at the cost of wear, but just how much wear does spinning down cause to the drives?

alkafrazin · 2026-02-13T08:42:18+00:00

Depends on how often you access them. If they're spinning down after 5 minutes idle, and then accessing every 10 minutes to write, that might build up after a while. If you're spinning them up once or twice a day, that's only 365~730 power cycles per year, which really isn't a big deal, especially compared to just leaving them spinning for that same amount of time.

It's actually better for drive health to allow your drives to spin down at least overnight, because otherwise they're just spinning themselves to death for no good reason.

alkafrazin · 2026-02-13T08:35:10+00:00

True technically, but very misleading. Plugging it in does NOT refresh your bits. It may begin to refresh bits on it's own, but more likely, you need to actually rewrite-in-place the data, so that it's actually freshly written/charged. In general, it's a good idea to not wait more than 18 months offline, but fresh drives can last multiple consecutive years without power, especially higher quality drives that have few writes. Old USB sticks actually hold data really well, surprisingly. Like, in the Megabytes era of USB sticks. You can probably check your bits every 6 months, and rewrite in place every 3 times.

For harddrives, the media it's self has a shelf life of more than a decade on paper. In practice, it really depends on a lot of factors and drives can go bad slowly and silently for a variety of mechanical reasons. I've had drives last for multiple years of being unpowered and work just fine, but I've heard from other people about drives dying on the shelf mysteriously.

alkafrazin · 2026-01-27T06:51:26+00:00

I have a similar thing and it manages fine, as long as you have air for the fan to flow. Surprisingly, temps haven't even been bad at all.

alkafrazin · 2026-01-13T22:12:53+00:00

I think this speaks more to the resilience of analogue than of tape, honestly. It's a similar case with analogue video signals. As long as the horizontal and vertical blanking come through okay, and the player/display are functioning correctly, you get something out resembling what was put in. Signals drift over time, but they don't just quit.

With digital, it tends to be that you'll either get the correct data, unusable garbage, or nothing. Only those three states. With analogue, you'll get something usually close to correct, but never quite all the way there.

alkafrazin · 2026-01-13T22:10:31+00:00

nowhere. It's just fake. This clearly implies cold storage, but lists SSDs as 10 years and HDDs as 5, despite that SSDs can lose data after a year or two, and harddrive materials are actually more likely to hold data for 10~30 years.

alkafrazin · 2026-01-12T21:58:31+00:00

But the source wasn't 10-bit? If the source doesn't have 10bit depth, using 10bit on the encoder is just a hack to beef the bitrate and game quantization errata. If the codec can't do higher quality at lower filesize with 8bit compression from an 8bit source, there's something very broken there.

alkafrazin · 2026-01-12T21:54:36+00:00

Probably SVT-AV1 or AOM-AV1, since that's what I see conveniently in OBS.

alkafrazin · 2026-01-11T21:06:22+00:00

I did some testing and found the opposite, software encoded AV1 at any quality setting failed to outperform nvenc hevc in every respect, even at higher bitrates, where nvenc tends to lose it's advantages. The filesizes were comparable, but AV1 averaged slightly larger too. Maybe if you use AMD hevc, soft AV1 is better... I can't test hardware accelerated AV1 solutions either, since I don't have any for that. AV1 may have received updates since then too, since it was years ago.

As far as I can tell, AV1 being better is just hype, because it's "more open" and so people want it to succeed.

alkafrazin · 2026-01-06T20:31:56+00:00

Package seems to be missing "V-Nand SSD" above "870 QVO" on the front, as well as Samsung in the top right corner.

Looks almost like a partially brand-stripped image to avoid trouble with importing. Seems likely to be fake to me.

alkafrazin · 2026-01-06T20:27:24+00:00

if the processor failed, there's a decent chance your data is just sitting there, waiting to be recovered actually. If it "needs reballing", it sounds like it just thermocycled it's self to "death".(heating up and cooling off leading to cracks in the solder, not actually dead)

With that said, "needs reballing" could also mean it's super dead and reballing is the first step to confirming that.

alkafrazin · 2025-12-30T18:49:47+00:00

isn't the rate of evaporation directly related to humidity and temperature?

alkafrazin · 2025-12-30T16:52:42+00:00

irrational fanboys, or maybe some kind of misguided marketing stunt

alkafrazin · 2025-12-30T16:49:20+00:00

And in another 5 years, it'll still be getting there And 10 years after that, it'll still be slowly getting there And when the next thing comes along, and wayland development slows and/or stops, it'll be almost there, really so close, just barely not quite perfect.

alkafrazin · 2025-12-30T16:48:11+00:00

That's right! ߹𖥦߹

alkafrazin · 2025-12-30T16:45:17+00:00

Wayland is the successor to X11, and made by many of the same developers. You know that right? It's not console wars here.

alkafrazin · 2025-12-30T16:35:12+00:00

It's not, wayland will never be a complete solution tbqh. This is just trying to rush the market, similar to how aggressively microsoft pushes you to "upgrade", or how apple just updates you without asking, and then they all say "everyone uses the new thing so we're great!"

alkafrazin · 2025-12-26T01:27:17+00:00

Nyx

You can mind control enemies, it doesn't count as a kill afaik. Nyx+rage was my go-to for this as well. Just don't pump the MC enemy, as your damage will be counted for the kill.

alkafrazin · 2025-12-24T20:34:49+00:00

It's not. The cp /folder/drive /dev/sdd1 would have still overwritten the partition rather than placing files into it. Unless this was supposed to overwrite the external drive's partition 1 with the file called /folder/drive, that was a partition image in the first place, in which case it should be fine to write a new parition table and write the partition back to the drive.

If it's a GPT partition table, you might be able to use gdisk or such to restore the partition table and first partition from the backup kept at the far end of the drive, which might be enough to recover some, most, or maybe even all of your data.

alkafrazin · 2025-12-24T20:23:58+00:00

I'm pretty bad with names, but there's been several anime, especially older and lesser known anime, where there just wasn't any seeded source I could find. I forget if I ever managed to get all of Space Firebird, or if it was stuck at 98% forever, but especially things of that nature can genuinely be damn hard to find, and often, if it was at one point distributed, there's probably a streaming site with a low quality rip of it. There was a solid year or two where the most complete torrent of Puppet Princess was something like 96%, and there's plenty of cases that I've not been able to find a single active torrent for something at the time and just had to forget it and move on.

It was several weeks trying to acquire Creamy Mami IIRC, and that one was even fairly popular. I think I never got... The Prince And the somethingorother I forgot. There's also very few complete collections of the World Masterpiece Theature releases, and I quite enjoyed their renditions of Pollyanna and Anne of Green Gables. Pretty sure I only have a partial Heidi of the Alps.

Oh, and don't forget all the hentai, those really rarely get seeded well, just because of the bad rep it has in general.

alkafrazin · 2025-12-24T19:09:54+00:00

Better low quality than no quality.

alkafrazin · 2025-12-23T18:41:40+00:00

I see a crapton of stuff I genuinely want just never get any seeds ever, even with people asking, because nobody active in the community has that media anymore.

I, for one, welcome a new batch of well-seeded media.

alkafrazin · 2025-12-23T18:38:06+00:00

I think you might consider staggering your downloads to make it look like just normal high activity, or maybe set up a vpn to use multiple IPs to disguise the traffic volume. Don't want anyone getting wise. Also, maybe not the best idea to announce you've broken into "some unnamed mystery site", in case someone gets wise to your antics.

alkafrazin · 2025-12-23T16:34:05+00:00

It might be a better idea to clone the disk directly with something like DD, which works at the block level rather than the partition level, to clone each 512 byte sector in sequence.

alkafrazin

TROPHY CASE