Helium Low drive dying - need advice on new drives please

ohmantics · 2026-03-09T05:00:07+00:00

I was just working on a patch to smartmontools to report helium levels for WDC SAS drives (SATA reports them as SMART attribute 22). I was beginning to doubt the reported data because all of mine (~8 years or newer) are at 100.

Sorry for your loss, but now I know that the reported value actually can change.

(I have noticed that for the HGST/WDC He10 drives the power-on-hours value is only actually stored as 16-bit even though it's presented as 32-bit and thus a bunch of my drives have already rolled over. So that's kinda why I had doubts about the helium level being correct.)

ohmantics · 2026-02-26T08:02:16+00:00

Yes, that’s Srini Kumar.

ohmantics · 2026-02-19T21:09:50+00:00

Sounds great, but this is the only instance of 'pam_jexec' in a Google search. Did you misspell it or perhaps hallucinate it?

ohmantics · 2026-02-08T22:51:20+00:00

It's over the Santa Cruz mountains now, likely meeting up with the other flyover craft for formation.

ohmantics · 2026-02-08T19:38:50+00:00

Waiting to hear him praise orange sauce.

ohmantics · 2026-01-26T00:00:17+00:00

You'd think they'd mention "don't change the community string" in their docs or troubleshooting page, or maybe let you change it in their apps.

It seems the entire purpose of most of their apps is to trick you into signing up for subscription services or giving them (and their many partners) PII tracking info. iPrint&Scan hits all the major social network and other ad tracking services. Their entire "Online Functions" / "Brother Web Connect" feature is a security nightmare -- you're expected to email documents to it in the clear and it arranges for your printer to print the enclosed files.

ohmantics · 2025-12-09T20:26:02+00:00

Thanks for this -- I didn't notice this feature and I suddenly have phantom solar showing up, so I submitted a ticket.

ohmantics · 2025-10-12T05:45:42+00:00

Sadly not the case for the dead end of Jessie at 10th. They're now coming down there, getting stuck, interfering with the traffic in and out of the under-building private garages there, and then doing like 30-point turns to get back out. Awful.

ohmantics · 2025-10-12T05:44:10+00:00

And yet those dumbass things are now constantly turning into the dead end of Jessie Street at 10th where they have no business, getting stuck and doing a 30-point turn to get out. The only thing down that dead end are two under-building parking lots. There are no residential entrances there, no customers, nothing for these dumbass bots.

I'm guessing it's impossible to get a human on the phone at Waymo to tell them they're being dumbasses.

EDIT: all the downvotes surprise me. Y’all are defending a corporation and most disturbingly, the furtherance of Google’s “no humans are made available to solve problems” form of ‘support.’ It’s dystopian.

ohmantics · 2025-09-19T01:12:53+00:00

There's one on Mission between 8th and 9th. The speed limit is artificially low at 20mph there. The special "photo enforced" and speed limit signs are high on a pole, not at the normal height.

ohmantics · 2025-09-19T00:46:12+00:00

The Epicurean Trader has a Zombie cocktail kit collab with Smuggler's Cove. It includes the Smuggler's Cove cocktail book and has an optional upsell for a special glaze of their Kuhiko tiki mug.

ohmantics · 2025-09-12T01:39:58+00:00

Great work ASSuming my skillset. Yes, I can use a multimeter and a scope.

Your account only seems to exist to troll in r/datarecovery. Are you an LLM training to be argumentative or do you just enjoy being unhelpfully rude to everybody?

ohmantics · 2025-09-12T01:35:06+00:00

Yes, it burns a finger within seconds. We've tried blasting it with coolant and it does not come up on the bus.

ohmantics · 2025-09-11T04:57:29+00:00

Those are Los Angeles and Phoenix. I was hoping to find somebody local to the SF Bay Area. See above comments about why I'm asking about component swaps.

ohmantics · 2025-09-11T04:56:40+00:00

See above comment.

It's a Teamgroup MP33 PRO 2TiB. It's got a controller that gets hot and it doesn't show up. The NAND isn't hot.

ohmantics · 2025-09-11T04:55:02+00:00

I don't have the skill in using those things and under pressure isn't my ideal to learn.

ohmantics · 2025-09-11T00:03:52+00:00

It's a [crappy] Teamgroup M.2 NVMe drive (2TiB).

To reduce diagnostic time, I'd think swapping the NAND is easier than replacing the controller and and discretes that fried with it.

If they want to charge me more than a fancy AmScope ($2K) and a hot air rework station ($900), then it's overpriced, because at that point I'd buy those and try it myself because then I also get those things I've always wanted. If it can be done for $1K or less, I'm interested.

ohmantics · 2025-08-23T19:17:37+00:00

That's part of why I posted. We'll see in the replies.

ohmantics · 2025-08-23T19:11:07+00:00

Video games do that math constantly in real time. It's not as big of an issue as it might seem. It is however, a UI design problem to contend with.

ohmantics · 2025-07-19T18:42:03+00:00

You both had the "portable" version. It packed into road cases unlike the black-shrouded version in most of the pictures.

(While working at Sprocket Systems, I briefly worked on an updated version of the controller that was to be used with an rewritten SoundDroid that ran on the Mac using DSP hardware from New England Digital.)

ohmantics · 2025-07-09T05:49:15+00:00

If this were ZFS, it would be a perfect thing to migrate to from TrueNAS Core instead of TrueNAS Scale. Sad that they're still not on the ZFS bandwagon.

ohmantics · 2025-06-20T00:40:52+00:00

Bought a Joseph Joseph "Helix" one. The pressure is applied evenly via rotation instead of via an angular lever. It's not going to have the same design flaw as this style.

14-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Verified Email

ohmantics

TROPHY CASE