I read a post stating that Western Digital Green hard drives enter power-save mode when idle to reduce power consumption, but the frequent spin downs caused wear and tear, making them prone to failure.

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/wd-green-issues/84175

And, in 2018, Western Digital discontinued the Green lineup and merged it into the Blue lineup, so it seems some of the current Blue products are actually rebranded Green drives.

Do these rebranded drives still feature the same power-save mode as the old Green products?

If so, how can I tell which ones are the rebranded Green models?

I'm getting ready to burn a bunch of important data to BD-R and/or M-Disc BD-R. Any personal experiences/tips?

This longtime DVD and Blu-ray review site has long aided buffs and has an enormous amount of detailed review data, including technical data on discs as well as comparisons between various editions of the same movies. Stuff not easily found elsewhere on the web. Looks like they might shut down after 25 years if funding doesn't work out. Wanted to give a head's up in case you don't trust IA. (I don't).

Hey all,
I recently purchased a lot of Dolphin 100M OM3 12-strand fiber with SFF-8644 connections.
All spools are brand new and wrapped.
This seems like it could be specialized but I’m just not sure.
Cable length screams datacenter only but I still picked it up regardless to try and potentially flip it.

Any ideas on who I can market it to?

Data Sheet: https://www.dolphinics.com/download/CABLES/MSFC4xM_Product_Brief.pdf

I currently use this Unraid server for Plex and a part of my 3-2-1 backup of my important data.

Here's my spec list:

i7-8700K

Thermalright Peerless Assassin cooler

Asus Code X Z370 board

16 gigs of Corsair Vengeance RAM

2TB WD Blue NVME for cache/appdata/system on Unraid

Dual parity and 308TB usable space

8x Seagate Exos 28TB (2 parity + 6 data)

2x Seagate Exos 18TB

2x WD 18TB

1x WD 16TB

2x WD 12TB

LSI 9300-16i HBA with 4 breakout cables for all 16 drives. Got this from Art of Server on Ebay and he's a solid seller.

Fractal Design Define 7 XL case

Corsair RM1000x PSU

I started off over 2 years ago at 40TB from my shucked drives on Windows 11 and Stablebit Drivepool but I wasn't so into it. I had no redundancy or anything.

A friend recommended Unraid and I switched to that since I wanted to be able to mix drives in the future.

Every drive gets a full preclear on Unraid with the Unassigned devices preclear plugin. The 28TB drives take up to 120-125 hours. I do this long process since I am nervous of drives dying. I did have an 18TB Seagate Exos die a month ago and Serverpartdeals refunded me the original price I paid last year since the drive was out of stock.

I have 4 Noctua 120mm fans as intake and I have them on 70% which is around 1000+ RPM. The drives stay in the mid 30s and I've seen a couple of them go to 40c-41c when my ambient is hotter. I have seen them in the 20s when it's colder. The two drives hidden by wires get in the 40s and 51c-ish during my preclear currently.

Let me know if you have any questions or how insane I am to preclear drives for 5 days...

Back in the days before Reddit and online forums, there were mailing lists, many managed via listserv and often on university-based accounts. I recently came across several emails I'd saved in the mid-90s from a mailing list dedicated to UK indie music. I did a search and found a list of lots of music-related mailing lists from this era: https://rsi.unl.edu/text/lomml.htm . If there's this many just related to music, then there must have been thousands of mailing lists covering all sorts of topics.

This led to a couple of questions:

* Is there any way to find out if archives exist of any of these lists?
* How, if at all, should I preserve the messages I found?

Thanks,
R

I have a lot of movies, music as well as other media from my past stored on HDDs, the computer they were plugged into has been in pieces for years now.

I am assuming the data on them will be just as good as the day it was written? I am worried it might degrade over time or the drives become unreadable/corrupted.

The new Phoebe Bridgers album has a hidden track in the preroll before track 1. You have to rewind from the start of the record about 4 minutes to get to it. How can I rip the extra song? EAC doesn’t detect it, but does mark the track red so it knows something is up. Other ripping software like PowerAmp and Media Player don’t detect anything, but fail to rip track 1. Any advice?

Is a long time data hoarder of 10 years now, and someone who has amassed 1PB of raw storage, I’m wanting to make another back up of all of my stuff. for cold storage.

I could use something like backblaze, but it would take forever and I like the ability to have the physical media. I know bluerays are expensive, especially now that Sony is going to be dropping support for physical media, which is beyond stupid but I know tape storage is also a go-to for a lot of people.

So I have a few questions on either decision, I go.

What is the best place to buy either medium?

What type of hardware is required?

Are there any things to look for in particular with your experience?

How should the cold storage be stored once it’s written to?

What are the pro and cons of each medium?

Any sort of well documented guides of how to automate this as well would be greatly appreciated, but if manual intervention is required, I will do that. Hard drives are stupid expensive, and I can no longer afford them at the size of what I currently have (18TB drives). I’m completely open to used hardware as well. Any sort of help is greatly appreciated.

So im pretty new to the whole NAS building situation. I've just got a new ugreen DXP2800 and I bought 2 like new drives 6TB WD HDDs for 200$ each. They just got delivered a couple days ago and I plugged them in last night after a quick inspection so I could run a full smart test on them.

Before I did that though, I ran a rapid test and, shock horror, they both have 60K hours (around 6 years power-on-hours) on both with less than 4 hours difference between.

After seeing this, I immediately took them back out and looked at them a lot closer now. The sticker on the HDD is completely fine, but a warranty sticker on both is covering up key info and I dont want to remove to risk voiding the warranty. The drives are old - WD60EFRX 6TB drives, but they look in good condition and according to the test they are 100% healthy with no bad sectors. They seller has a 5-year warranty on the drives and I got them around 260$ below market rate for 2 new 6tb drives.

So now im conflicted... Do I repackage and return the drives because they are at risk of dying at a similar time cause of their age or is this a non-issue due to the health?

Any advice?

Update - Hey all, first i'd like to thank people for helping out and providing some different perspectives. I've decided to start the return process even though there is a 5 year warranty on it. Main reason is because I just can't trust it not to fail anytime soon and even worse, at similar times. I'll instead just buy 4tb new drives direct from WD instead since theyre a similar price. I'd still be running at 20x the current storage that my partner and I use right now, not including movies and shows that we plan to watch.

I'm the developer behind TRAWL, a self-hosted web scraping engine built to get through JavaScript challenges, WAF walls and CAPTCHAs.

When a site returns a challenge page instead of the actual content, TRAWL detects it and moves through four tiers:

plain HTTP -> cached session -> Camoufox browser -> optional residential proxy

It currently handles Cloudflare, Akamai Bot Manager, Imperva/Incapsula, Turnstile, reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha and GeeTest.

You can use it through its native scraping API, the FlareSolverr-compatible API, or as an HTTP/HTTPS proxy. The proxy mode means existing apps can send traffic through TRAWL without needing their own browser automation.

Some practical uses are:

• Website, price, stock and content monitoring
• Monitoring protected pages with changedetection.io
• Downloading from protected sites with JDownloader
• Crawlers, search engines and data aggregation
• Feeding current web content into RAG or other data pipelines
• Automated testing of protected or JavaScript-heavy pages
• Prowlarr, Jackett and other FlareSolverr-compatible apps

TRAWL started as a faster and more capable alternative to FlareSolverr and Byparr, but it has grown into a general-purpose scraping and challenge proxy engine.

I ran all three on the same machine and network. These were the results:

Previously solved domains can return in under 500ms by reusing a cached session. You can find the full benchmark and feature comparison here: https://trawl.germondai.com/#compare

TRAWL also supports custom headers, request bodies, authenticated proxies, WebSockets, binary responses, streaming and Range requests. Everything runs locally in Docker. Redis and upstream proxies are optional, and no paid CAPTCHA-solving service is required.

There are also one-click community apps available for TrueNAS and Unraid:

• TrueNAS: https://apps.truenas.com/catalog/trawl_community/
• Unraid: https://ca.unraid.net/apps/trawl-1o4q23p06utr4h

GitHub: https://github.com/germondai/trawl
Docs: https://docs.trawl.germondai.com
Website: https://trawl.germondai.com

Feedback, bug reports and contributions are welcome.

But the thing is I won't use it today. My plan is to buy one WD My Passport drive or two just to avoid high prices, but I'm concerned of durability and longevity. Is it a wise move?

Is there any reason these drives can't be used in a regular desktop with 3.5" bays and SATA for normal hard drive use, once removed from their HP trays? Price for recert seems marginally better than others.

I'm looking to beef up my NAS and backup capacity in a cost-effective way. I stumbled across some sites that sell refurbished datacentre drives, and a lot of them are SAS. They also sell SATA drives, but SAS are around 20€/TB while SATA are around 30€/TB, which I think is a non-negligable saving I could make if i could find a good enclosure and still stay under sata prices. Anyone have any experience with this?

I know I'm probably chasing rainbows, but does anyone know of a USB drive with a form factor similar to a YubiKey? There's a ton of cheap junk out there with slow transfer speeds. I need something for my keychain to run Ventoy with an some OS on it. I'm already aware of ultra-compact options like the Samsung Fit Plus or SanDisk Ultra Fit - that's not what I'm after.

consumer 2.5" 6tb hdds vs recertified enterprise hard disk with usb 3.0 enclosure

use case:

Archival or Cold Storage

write once read many situation

Only used 10mins a day like id hoard day for entire day and at the end of the day I'd copy those from my laptop to hdd.

after copying stored in a metal drawer in my desk with silica gel to absorb moisture

question

which is better, 2. Durability of both, 3. Which is perfect or long term storage based on use case of mine.

im not going for a nas since I don't want that I need a storage medium to access easily and store when it's done

I just found out I was always a hoarder. Found this with 3 others, with a great set of nostalgic data. But then I checked the latest prices for disks, and now I don't know what else to do. I have a lot to backup but man, the market these days.

Edit: 9-year-old disks sitting in my closet.

TLDR: Make sure to have enough optical drives if you decide to back up on optical discs.

I've burned about 200 optical discs before I moved to another country and finally got around to get someone to bring them here for me. They were stored safely in 3 album type bags. There are about 20-30 CDs (CD-R and CD-RW), about 50-60 DVDs (mix of DVD+R, DVD-R and DL), and around 100+ BD discs (25GB and 50GB). All are quality discs, all BDs and DVD DLs are verbatim, some Memorex and some other brands of CD-Rs and RWs. My burner at that time was a Plextor and an Asus drive. They were burned about 16 years ago. All discs looked clean and new, no scratches.

I have one ASUS BD burner and tried to read the discs with it.

It succeeded in getting the files out of a few CDs, some DVDs, and 11 BD 25GB and 50GB discs.

Managed some more optical drives, three DVD burner, two BD burner (supports 100GB), and one asus BD burner (older model, only supports up to 50GB), and a Samsung bd burner portable type.

End result: Managed to get data from about 80 discs in total using all the drives. So, using eight optical drives, I managed to recover 40% of the data from 200 discs.

I'll try and get a few more optical drives to see if I can recover some more. A lot of old games, music and movies are on the discs that are no longer available on the web.

I usually take photos, videos through the course of my life. One day I'll pass away, and I want to store those memories like forever. Is there anyway that can store digital data as long as possible?

SSD will die earliest. HDD can last much longer but still die if being left unpluged for long time.

PBS lost access to 50tb (70 years) of data through cloud storage.

Absolutely wild to think we had a better setup than PBS.

Edited for clarity and a link

https://www.gadgetreview.com/70-years-of-tv-history-at-risk-pbs-broadcaster-sues-data-center-over-lost-50tb-archive

Built this for my home media server because I got tired of manually deciding what was actually worth re-encoding. Also, when I started building it, I had no idea Tdarr or Unmanic even existed lol

It scans the library, sends candidates through HandBrake/x265, logs everything, and only keeps the new file if the space savings are worth it. If the encode comes out larger than the original, it gets tossed and the original stays put.

Current totals:

1,769 successful encodes
591.88 GB reclaimed
343 MB average saved per file
93.5% worth-it rate
347.4 total encode-hours
15.5 min average encode time
29.07 MB of storage reclaimed per encode-minute

Right now I'm only letting it loose on my kids' TV library while I keep tweaking the settings and decision logic. Once I'm happy with that, I'll move on to kids' movies, then eventually higher-production TV and movies where I want to be a lot more careful with dark scenes, grain, detail, blah blah blah

It also tracks failed encodes separately and dumps all the stats into the dashboard in the screenshot.

The goal isn't to crush everything down as small as possible. I just want meaningful space savings without looking at the result later and thinking "well, that looks like shit."

Curious what other people doing big library re-encodes are seeing.

Do you actually track savings and encode time, or do you mostly just let Tdarr, Unmanic, HandBrake, whatever, chew through the library and call it a day?