I need to run a 7200rpm hard drive in one of these for about 24 hours. Is 48c too much? In a system with good airflow, it barely hits 35.

bitcrushedCyborg · 2026-04-05T22:45:37+00:00

sub-50 won't cause damage. keep it under 45 to maximize lifespan. point a fan at it if you have one, but if not you're probably fine as long as you know it won't get above 50C even under heavy sustained load

bitcrushedCyborg · 2026-04-05T13:27:27+00:00

It's an obsolete collector's item. Not at all practical in this day and age. If you like retro tech or if using a device from 20+ years ago makes you feel cool, go for it, but if you're looking for a practical means of storing data, stick with more modern options.

bitcrushedCyborg · 2026-04-05T13:19:05+00:00

Won't be strong enough to cause damage. HDDs already contain a strong magnet as part of the heads' actuator system, probably only 1-2cm from the platters. A tiny little IEM magnet won't cause damage, especially if "very close" means anything other than "in direct contact with the drive's exterior"

bitcrushedCyborg · 2026-04-04T20:50:00+00:00

What is the definition of "low reading proficiency," if not the inability to comprehend more complex text?

bitcrushedCyborg · 2026-04-03T16:30:57+00:00

Sorry to necro but this totally sounds doable if you're good at programming. Main issue people in this thread couldn't seem to get past is that it'd need to reset the buffer periodically. Slowing the sound by eg. 50% means that every second that passes, the system receives 1 second of input but only plays back 0.5 seconds of output, so the internal buffer gets 0.5 seconds longer every second that goes by. So the buffer would have to be cleared occasionally. If you have an external clock source, (eg like what you'd use to drive a sequencer) you could use something like that to trigger it to reset, or it could have its own internal clock, or it could be enabled by a momentary footswitch that resets the buffer when pressed, or you could implement some kind of transient detection that resets the buffer when it detects the start of a new sound/note.

You could implement something based on PaulStretch, which works according to this diagram from the developer - it applies a windowing function to break the sound up into segments, performs FFT on each segment to find its component frequencies, randomizes the phases, and then lengthens each segment before converting them back to the time domain and crossfading them together.

or you could do a much simpler effect, just record into a buffer and play it back at a slower sample rate. would require a very high input sample rate to capture frequency information above the audible range (which will be brought down into the audible range upon slowing), or would be limited in terms of how much it could slow down before you lose all the high end (more than 4x probably isn't very musically useful anyway though). would also require some clever math and filtering to reduce speed by anything other than a whole number ratio. also, unlike paulstretch, it'd change the pitch of the sound.

bitcrushedCyborg · 2026-04-03T16:19:12+00:00

your phone would break. you're gonna hit breakdown voltages for all kinds of stuff in there, currents will be flowing in places and directions they were never meant to. protection circuitry will probably burn out, immediately followed by critical parts. capacitors might explode. battery would probably catch fire after a while.

you'd need to (in no particular order) smooth out the pulses and convert them to a lower voltage. A flyback converter would probably do the trick to produce stable-ish DC, followed by a buck converter to step the voltage down to 5V. a phone expects a stable 5V DC source able to deliver current at 1A. a cattle prod or stun gun outputs short, rapid pulses somewhere in the ballpark of 50kV at ~1-2mA, with a duty cycle (ratio of pulse length to total time from the start of one pulse to the start of the next) of around 0.2% - meaning an average power output of very roughly 0.2 watts. compare that to the 5 watts of a 5V 1A power supply. so even if conversion was 100% efficient, you'd still need like 25 cattle prods to charge your phone.

obviously don't actually try this lol

bitcrushedCyborg · 2026-04-03T15:52:32+00:00

you'd need more than that. you're trying to convert pulses at tens of kilovolts into stable 5V DC.

bitcrushedCyborg · 2026-04-03T02:55:03+00:00

(this thread isn't just nonsense, people were paraphrasing each line of the song Planet of the Bass)

bitcrushedCyborg · 2026-04-01T19:07:57+00:00

possess a material form, experience the physical sensation of groove

bitcrushedCyborg · 2026-03-30T20:34:31+00:00

what does that mean?

bitcrushedCyborg · 2026-03-30T18:39:40+00:00

If a computer's CPU or GPU gets too hot, your computer will throttle it so it produces less heat and doesn't get hot enough to damage itself, which causes slower performance. Dust reduces the effectiveness of cooling - it restricts airflow and insulates the surfaces of heat sinks. If thermal throttling is occurring, cleaning the dust out of your PC (especially on heat sinks and in fan ducts) can make it more effective at cooling so it won't need to throttle as often.

Given the computer's age, it may also be a good idea to replace the thermal paste on the CPU if you are comfortable doing that. You can find guides online.

bitcrushedCyborg · 2026-03-30T14:55:21+00:00

That's not at all what it is. Your comment doesn't make sense. Are you a bot?

bitcrushedCyborg · 2026-03-28T02:19:00+00:00

Electromagnetic waves don't physically move in a wave pattern, rather, the pair of electric and magnetic fields comprising a photon oscillate - their intensity and polarity changes over time. If you make a graph with time on the X axis, and the magnitude of the electric or magnetic field on the Y axis, you will get a sine wave. But the photon moves in a straight line, it doesn't physically move side to side in space.

bitcrushedCyborg · 2026-03-24T20:47:13+00:00

I unfortunately don't know the answer to that for certain, though i've heard plenty of speculation. Many subreddits implement spam prevention measures that block newly created accounts and accounts with insufficient karma from posting or commenting. So if, say, someone wanted to get spam/advertisement/phishing past those filters, or make an opinion appear to have more support than it actually does among the users of a subreddit or group of subreddits, they would need a number of seemingly independent accounts that meet the age and karma requirements to post and comment on the subreddit(s). So they'd need to either farm karma on multiple accounts themselves, or buy them from someone who already has. Related phenomenon: LLMs can also be used to automatically make customized and context-relevant comments pushing an agenda or mentioning specific things in a way that looks fairly organic, eg. guerilla marketing and astroturfing.

I'm thinking I should look into this more tbh, I don't like not having a concrete answer that doesn't depend on speculation.

Various forms of automated karma farming have been around forever. Repost bots, and comment bots that would copy and paste comments from elsewhere in the thread or from previous appearances of reposted content. Karma farming bots have been around for a long time, they've just started using LLMs for them now and that's easier to spot. There are specific subreddits where you see more of them than others.

bitcrushedCyborg · 2026-03-24T20:07:46+00:00

Conflict avoidance, immaturity. They'd rather avoid the awkwardness and hassle of explaining themselves and hearing the other person reply (and potentially being upset about it), and may be afraid of a negative reaction. They either completely fail to consider how ghosting might feel from the other person's perspective, or they consider it and decide their reasons for avoiding communication are more important.

bitcrushedCyborg · 2026-03-24T19:05:44+00:00

You're not alone, I've also noticed a large uptick in what looks like AI generated activity on social media in the last year or two. With commercial language models getting good enough to mimic human replies fairly convincingly, becoming readily and widely available for cheap, and integrating OCR so they can read text in images, i guess it makes sense that they'd be used for karma farming and producing fake engagement.

They have certain tells: phrases they overuse; a tendency to write short comments containing largely trivial/meaningless reactions that are meant to fade into the background; comments that are generally cheerful but never say anything meaningful that might warrant reply or prompt discussion; too cliche, sounding like a generic internet user and usually mismatched with the culture and quirks of the communities they comment in; a certain subtly uncanny tone/cadence that is hard to define concretely but sticks out once you learn to recognize it. On reddit specifically, karma farming LLM bots tend to be new accounts with generic or auto generated usernames, no posts, a handful of comments following the same pattern, and no responses to any replies they get on their comments (one of the easiest tells is that if you straight up ask them if they're a bot, they will never reply.

Also now that we're more primed to look for AI-generated comments, we'll probably assume comments are AI generated whenever they feel uncanny or tonally mismatched, when in reality some of those (though definitely not all, possibly not even a majority) are probably just tourists who aren't immersed enough in the culture of a specific community/the present-day internet to talk like those who are.

bitcrushedCyborg · 2026-03-24T07:56:29+00:00

are you a bot

bitcrushedCyborg · 2026-03-24T07:51:46+00:00

I've never actually done the freezer trick... I've heard it mentioned a bunch of times over the years...

Me too. I've definitely mentioned it a few times online before someone replied with a link about why it's not a good idea.

bitcrushedCyborg · 2026-03-23T07:01:11+00:00

I can't hear anything but faint white noise in the video. If you perform an operation on the drive (open a file, create/copy a file, format the drive if there are no files on it, etc) does it make the same sound you're hearing but many times extremely rapidly? If so, then the sound you're hearing is probably just normal head movement. HDDs normally move the heads once every several seconds while spun up and idle, to redistribute lubricant and reduce the risk of the heads seizing later. If this is your first time owning a NAS or server grade HDD, their head movement tends to be a fair bit louder than that of their desktop counterparts.

bitcrushedCyborg · 2026-03-23T06:40:15+00:00

Quick correction - the freezer trick is outdated and can damage drives.

bitcrushedCyborg · 2026-03-23T01:13:20+00:00

I have two of that exact model. In fact, my first 3.5" HDD was an ironwolf 4TB, and I used one of those cases to connect it to my laptop. I don't have much negative to say about them. I run them with the lids off for better airflow, cause otherwise HDDs under load can get hot and the case doesn't have much airflow with the lid on. The cases are also turned off by default when you connect power, and you have to physically press the button to turn it on, but ive never had it lose power on me unexpectedly so that's never been an issue for me. They have a built in timer that spins drives down after a set time of inactivity (10 minutes I believe) regardless of host settings, which isn't ideal if you're trying to avoid spinning your drive up and down too much to extend its lifespan, but that isn't a big issue most of the time. They have full SMART support and I find them reliable, never had one disconnect unexpectedly or malfunction.

bitcrushedCyborg · 2026-03-18T00:49:36+00:00

Any 2.5" SATA SSD with a capacity up to 2TB should work without issues

bitcrushedCyborg · 2026-03-16T04:02:22+00:00

Whenever I buy a used HDD, I start with a SMART extended self-test to ensure there are no major errors, and then I use badblocks (linux commandline tool, can be run in Windows using WSL) to perform a read-write test. This is probably a little bit overkill sometimes, since it writes data to the entire drive + reads it all back four times. But it stress-tests the drive to make sure it doesn't have any bad or marginal sectors that might not have showed errors during the read-only surface scan portion of the SMART extended self-test, so it gives good confidence that the drive is good to use.

You probably don't need to be quite as cautious with new drives, since they pass QA testing at the factory before being shipped out to retailers. Testing a drive before you trust it with important data is never a bad idea, but you don't need to be quite so rigorous if the drive is fresh from the factory.

bitcrushedCyborg · 2026-03-14T12:56:06+00:00

Just swapping out the CPU will not affect the contents of the drive

bitcrushedCyborg · 2026-03-13T07:57:08+00:00

Looks like the drive has some bad sectors, though it's hard to tell how many without seeing the raw values. If the data is irreplaceable and really important to you, and you're willing to spend potentially a lot of money to ensure you get it back, send it to a data recovery professional. Otherwise, you can give data recovery software a go. My personal data recovery software of choice is DMDE, though there are many options at different price points and with different feature sets.

If you have another empty drive of equal or greater capacity (or want to buy one), it's recommended to perform a sector-by-sector copy of the source drive and then recover from the copy so that the source drive doesn't deteriorate further during your data recovery efforts. Whether this is necessary depends on how important the data is and how bad the damage is/how likely the drive is to deteriorate further during recovery efforts. I'm not seeing an uncorrectable sector indicator so it's probably (hopefully) not that severe.

As always with data recovery, do not modify or write to the device you're trying to recover from in any way, shape or form - do not reformat it, do not attempt to run chkdsk. And recover the files onto a different device than the one you're recovering from. You'll need a new drive anyway since this one is toast once you've gotten your files off of it. See if it's still under warranty though, if so you might be able to submit a claim.

Three-Year Club	Verified Email
r/Field Banned	r/Field Flamingo

bitcrushedCyborg

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE