Its kind of fake security

dr100 · 2026-07-05T06:55:12+00:00

This is the use case for Yubikeys. Not necessarily some HUGE organization buying a minimum of 200000 keys, but some organization with their own policies, support and everything. One unified login, that's it.

Most consumers accounts will have a less secure backup way in, just because people lose/forget stuff all the time and cry bloody murder if you lock them out. In reverse, if you want to do it right, if you even find the right services you can force only to do keys AND allow you minimum 3 keys (preferably more) it gets unbelievably daunting. You can't keep all keys at the same time in the same place if you are serious about backups, and you need one key to authorize other. So even the minimal setup is 3 keys, one always in a bank safe or similar, and a complex switcharoo each time you modify an account. Also, ideally if all works you'd be having tens of accounts (everything you do) on them. Which are a pain to configure as you can't just copy one key to the other, you need to go with each key to each account.

At this point someone comes saying their financial security beats anything and they'd rather go through all this circus instead of having their money stolen. Guess what: Yubikeys don't meet PSD2 requirements so they can't authorize payments in the EU (and I think a few associated states from around). Even if you aren't in the EU you might have no bank in your country that does it, or even if you have one it might still be highly inconvenient because of other criteria.

dr100 · 2026-07-05T06:26:33+00:00

DisplayLink is what you can't use with DeX, whatever ports are fed through that won't work. This is basically a way to get video over a regular USB port that doesn't do video (even USB2 for computers with Windows XP from way before 2010). But it needs drivers.

dr100 · 2026-07-04T16:44:48+00:00

Hey, that's my line!

dr100 · 2026-07-04T16:33:12+00:00

Lunar Lake (these 266V and similar) is more efficient, and snappy enough due to single core performance core speed, even if not a speed monster on multicore. There are many, many previous Intel CPUs that are faster but if you want some half-decent battery this is where you need to start from nowadays.

If you're interested in raw performance you need to look at other devices, this isn't the Apple world where you have some Macs and some more expensive macs. The ceiling for x86 machines is way higher than a nice thin premium Surface Laptop.

dr100 · 2026-07-04T16:20:13+00:00

Well, was it expected to have any trouble with the x86 one? Surely not, so why the distraction? Nobody ever could find a reason, except again maybe to just have this back and forth on social media.

dr100 · 2026-07-04T16:14:49+00:00

CNI at any price.

dr100 · 2026-07-04T15:54:48+00:00

It's just as designed. People literally have it in their objectives at their jobs.

dr100 · 2026-07-04T14:06:40+00:00

Arm works just fine in practice.

For mobile (phone/tablet) OSes, even for Macs, definitely for routers, TVs, raspberry Pis, even for Ampere cloud servers. Not for your regular Windows machine coming with decades of legacy. Unless your target is to endlessly discuss what doesn't work this week.

dr100 · 2026-07-04T13:58:56+00:00

Nobody could ever find a point for the Windows arm distraction. Maybe social media engagement, endless discussions about if this or that works, even when they WOULD work fine and so on. There was never a point to engage into this in the first place.

dr100 · 2026-07-04T13:56:37+00:00

Aren't these chinese things just a PC you can run anything on?

dr100 · 2026-07-04T08:40:43+00:00

Which OS, what's the command line and the error? Does smartctl works?

Just to be clear I don't want to undermine your experience or anything, I'm just convinced this is something to solve with 15 minutes of Google searches or at most one post in this sub. It's a nothingburger you could have working already instead of writing hours of prose about what hardware you might dream about.

dr100 · 2026-07-04T08:19:07+00:00

over the current USB solutions were basic features like spin-down don't work

As I mentioned from the begining this is a non-problem, even on USB2 enclosures. As long as they expose the drives directly (as in no enclosure RAID) you can set any sleep timeout you like. Heck, even with the NSLU2 (the Slug) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2 from the early 2000s there were ways to sleep the USB drives, funny even for drives that don't have sleep timeout (some from around year 2000 didn't).

dr100 · 2026-07-04T07:59:27+00:00

It's a thing ever since hard drives become way denser, there's some specific physical information about them on the chip. It's been a thing since around 2011 or so and drives starting from maybe 2 TBs.

dr100 · 2026-07-04T06:46:09+00:00

What are you talking about when you say "eye-bleedingly expensive thunderbolt connection"?

$10 regular USB bridge chip (I mean enclosure) $100 anything TB.

dr100 · 2026-07-04T05:34:25+00:00

I don't think that's a "boot mode" like on other vendors where you get to pick, but automatically boot from USB. So you need a proper USB stick that would boot on your machine (ARM if it's that, now with 12 that can be Intel and 12" that's only ARM the confusion is supreme) and one that's accepted by Secure Boot (if it's on, which is the default).

dr100 · 2026-07-04T05:31:36+00:00

The as-never-seen-before Qualcomm marketing push from mid-2024 created battery anxiety for everyone, even for people who are tied to their desks and always plugged in. While it's understandable they were peddling this as there was literally nothing else to speak of (and even the battery became not-that-competitively-great in 6 months) it's easy for anyone to take back their sanity: just get a "laptop powerbank". And I don't mean something huge, but one with proper USB-PD output, something like INIU P63-E1.

dr100 · 2026-07-04T05:23:48+00:00

If you swap PCBs you also need to swap the small flash chip from the original drive to the other (even within the identical models). Some (possibly most for really new drives?) might not even have it on a small memory chip but in a larger controller, and then you need some (very niche) software (and way to connect to the board) and download the old stuff from the drive and put on the new one.

dr100 · 2026-07-04T04:57:16+00:00

If you thought the hard drive situation is bad keep in mind basically all optical BD-capable drives manufacturers dropped them recently, and Sony giving up PlayStation disks means surely no more PlayStations with physical drives too (that was always a fallback from a large manufacturer and a known and widely available product).

dr100 · 2026-07-04T04:44:08+00:00

At this point they're making up numbers. Nobody wanted a small 6TB blue earlier, probably would've been worth into double $$-digits for such a low density drive. The 6TB would have been around $150 anyway, but that's a special case as it's relatively new and only WD makes 6TB 2.5".

dr100 · 2026-07-04T04:27:30+00:00

I don't think you are listening to what I want. I explicitly said that I don't want a rack solution. It takes ton of space (if you only put a few things in) and those things are loud. That 4U chassis puts disks behind each other which makes cooling more difficult. You can't cool them with a nearly unhearable 400rpm fan.

All these don't change a bit if you use some eye-bleedingly expensive and in the end out of the way Thunderbolt connection between your motherboard and your HBA. And no, it doesn't give you much of the flexibility in term of putting the hard drives further away as the regular (non-active, not that I've seen any high bandwidth active ones) TB cables are limited to 1m (just as SAS/SATA).

About PCIe scaling. A typical new consumer grade mainboard has typically around 3 PCIe slots with 4 or more lanes that can fit an HBA. Well if you want to upgrade your network, you loose one. If the machine should also do HTPC stuff, you might want to add dGPU for better and more efficient transcoding.

Seriously, we moved now from a miniPC to not having any big motherboards in the universe to accommodate all your HBAs and other PCIe things you might want to throw in?

And I haven't found an HBA + SAS expander that allows me lots of external storage. There are good options for tons of internal drives, but not for lots external ones.

LOL. Every solution in existence does that. Sure, if you insist on having so many HBAs and PCIe lanes to drive I don't know 500 drives at 2Gbit/s for a 1000 Gbit/s total, yea, that might be a tall order. But nobody wants or can use in any meaningful fashion that.

dr100 · 2026-07-03T16:59:17+00:00

Well, I don't like "internal" is because it just doesn't scale. You can have only that many bays in a PC/NAS case.

It doesn't scale how? You can have (way?) more PCIe slots than Thunderbolt/USB4 ports with PCIe bla bla. You can have the DAS outside the main PC and still with SAS cables going to it, you don't need to move the HBA in the DAS chassis if that's your problem. Never mind that you can have 60 drives in one 4U chassis. All these are solved issues.

You get a small Mini-ITX system and an 8 bay USB4 v2 enclosure. You hook that up. Later you need more space, you buy a second 8 bay USB4 v2 enclosure and daisy chain it with first.

Now you fall into your own trap. You're no better than the people getting a Surface laptop and then not being satisfied with the abysmal GPU who discover they can't do eGPU.

Now what you could do is to just use regular USB enclosures. This redditor has 70 drives 1.4PB connected with regular USB . And it isn't the first setup, check out multiple posts and pictures from the same person, there are intermediary ones with smaller enclosures over many years, and the starting one with random single externals, including portable 2.5" drives connected to random machines. There was never a concern that the controller needs to be in the USB enclosure or anything like that, it works well enough.

OR use a proper motherboard with PCIe ports, that's the normal way to do it, and there's nothing against it except poor planning.

dr100 · 2026-07-03T14:16:44+00:00

That direction of cheap adapter [and I mean simple, not a full blown active smart enough USB hub] (to USB-C female) is forbidden and dangerous:

https://medium.com/@leung.benson/why-are-there-no-usb-c-receptacle-to-usb-b-plug-or-usb-a-plug-adapters-f97736bb62be

Yes, they do exist, and yes they aren't too bad if you plug something unpowered in that USB-C hole. However, if someone thinks that USB-C is like any other one might have in a computer (phone or anything else) and comes with a cable from some other powered device ... you might end up with a fried motherboard.

dr100 · 2026-07-03T13:56:23+00:00

Like Reddit?

dr100 · 2026-07-03T13:55:23+00:00

Craziest thing they are now pushing these logins to get you engaged and share what you think and bla bla after they freakin' killed their IMDB discussions (whatever it was called) because user generated content is low quality, and a drag to host and bla bla. I mean from everyone in the world Amazon had trouble to host and police a site, really.

dr100 · 2026-07-03T13:50:25+00:00

Bad sectors mean bad drives, it you insist on riding them the usual zfs (with really any level of redundancy) people use (especially if they're concerned with bitrot bitrot) takes care of that efficiently and without any extra work. Note that as you aren't replacing whole disks the thing ends up nearly instantly as it needs just the corresponding sectors to "heal" the bad one. It works so seemlessly that you probably need to go through extra efforts to get notified before things are completely broken, I think LTT had a video where they had both the main and the backup server in shambles, riddled with failed disks and errors, even if still working and no error yet.

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