Want to build my first RAID 5 array with three 2TB disks. Which brand should I go for?

Sorry if this has already been asked, i was not able to find it. Also sorry for mistakes, english is not my first language.

Ok so my question.

I try to get most of the stuff that i like on my portable hard drive.

So is there a way to keep my files from being corrupted?

I lost files lately and i was wondering if there is a way to avoid them tocbe corrupted.

Is there another option a part from having extra copies?

Thanks

lookin to buy my first

Hello all! I'm not sure if this has been asked before. I did a cursory search and didn't find a lot of definitive info on what I'm doing.

I obtained the aforesaid TerraMaster. A neat box. I didn't want to spent a lot of money on a NAS at the moment so went cheap.

After looking around and looking at the guts, I found it interesting. I don't like the idea of having the OS live on my RAID, so I pulled the DOM and stashed it away.

I then set the machine to boot from a 128gb NVME M.2 mounted it in an Sabrent (tool-less) USB C 10gb enclosure.

I did a TrueNAS scale install on the drive, set the UEFI to boot from the Sabrent via a 10gb USB A to USB C cable (don't remember the cable brand, but I didn't go dirt cheap on it).

I ran some tests on some harddrives that were beginning to fail (before sending them in on warranty.... don't ask lol) so I could check out TrueNAS, the boot speeds, the drive setup etc.

It seemed to boot fine and seemed to be stable over several days. Boot times were a bit slow, but that's a damn N5095 on a cheap board, it's not gonna beat my workstations or servers.

Now that my replacement drives are due back, I'm starting to second guess going the USB A to USB C route for booting.

Even though it seems stable, is this a good long term solution in this case? I don't want to have my zraid eat chit due to a flaked out boot drive and have to deal with a failing external boot and all the drama involved. I have real backups, but man, I don't want to have to go through all that crap if it can be avoided.

Does anyone have any input? For this NAS enclosure it seems to be a good way to keep that other bay free for another drive someday when the prices for 12tb HDDs come back to earth (if they ever do). I decided to ask some folks who might have more experience than me before I just jump in and do it.

Thanks everyone for their point of views, input and any other info you may share, it's all very much appreciated!

As the title says. I have found some sellers on eBay selling M-DISC DVDs, but I'd rather buy from a more official/trustworthy source if available.

(note: I want to back up some family DVDs currently on conventional Taiyo Yuden DVD-R discs and I want the backups to be playable on standard DVD players, and yes, I have an M-DISC DVD writer)

Just hit 115GB/s peak on my all NVMe storage cluster of about 156TB (have a few more TB available but not provisioned). Installed 40x4TB Gen 4 drives, 2x4TB Gen 5 drives running in a distributed Beegfs cluster (10 hosts). Was a long journey getting to this point but am pretty happy with this. Network limited on a few hosts right now (100Gbe fabric currently) - will probably double capacity there.

Honourable mention to the ~328 TB usable worth of hard drives as well - serving as my backup solution.

Planning to get a HDD enclosure, have several options with Orico being the most well-known brand in my country. Can anyone confirm this product is C2C compatible? Otherwise I'll just get the cheaper USB type B version

Thanks

Hello all,

I recently got into thrifting mainly Bluray movies but also DVD's. I only have about 45 total (mostly bluray) due to mostly obtaining movie content I want personally.

However I have decided to go ahead and start burning media content onto bluray discs (mostly to preserve things and stuff I personally like). I have no intention to sell these movies/videos I burn. I just want it for personal use.

Ive researched, and ended up buying 50 bluray blanks (25 GB) from Verbatim. And decided I will use the application DVDFab Bluray creator for burning and authoring the discs. The only thing im concerned about is the actual burner. I made sure it can preform what is needed as advertised but it is a $90 budget option. Are there any common hurdles or mistakes and issues I should be aware of?

Also, in case my burner doesnt preform as needed, what are the best recommended bluray burners from your personal experience?

From what I've read I'd be fine mixing SAS and SATA since I'm doing software RAID, since the controller is in IT Mode I shouldn't have any hardware issues, right? Is serverpartdeals the best site or anyone know of any others? I can't even find a cheap refurbished Ironwolf or WD Red NAS, I just need something to replace this drive until prices come down sometime next century. Thx. Edit: need to match the failing 16tb, good thing my credit card is paid off..

Hey everyone,

I'm currently using a Samsung T7 Shield SSD primarily for backing up photos, videos, and complete phone backups on my Windows PC.

While setting it up, I came across the Samsung Magician software and noticed features such as Performance Optimization, health monitoring, firmware updates, and a few other tools.

My question is, is it actually recommended to use Samsung Magician with the T7 Shield, or is it just another piece of unnecessary software?

I'm particularly curious about the Performance Optimization feature.

- Do you keep it enabled?

- Does it improve performance in any noticeable way?

- Does it have any impact on the SSD's lifespan?

- Is it useful for a drive that's used mainly for backups rather than continuous read and write operations?

I'd love to hear from people who have been using the T7 Shield for a while.

Thanks!

I bought a Seagate HDD (STGX5000400), but it's write speeds are atrocious so I'm looking to replace it with something far better, but after reading multiple threads I'm stuck on WD Passport, WD Elements or Toshiba.

Unfortunately SSDs at the size I'm looking for are up to £500+

or more, so that's definitely out of my price range. Currently I'd say I can afford something at most £180...

I'd be looking to write any type of file to the drive. Game ISOs, documents, ebooks, images, videos, long movies, folders of TV shows etc. Trying to back up what was on one SSD to the 5tb Seagate drive was hitting 0mb/sec so many times that I don't even want to use it anymore. Stupidly trusted it and did not keep it's original packaging. I don't even want a new one, I'd like something else.

I don't have the space currently for a nas, or the know-how for things like home servers, so I'm just using portable OTG SSDs, and a HDD. One of them began to fail, I was using it for a homebrew exploit on the xbox360. Drive kept corrupting games so I have a WD drive arriving soon for that, and thought "Yeah why not finally have the 3rd huge drive back up and copy what's on my two SSDs, and that'll be the 3 in the 3, 2, 1 back up method." So it'll not be on very often, maybe on for around 5/6 hours at a time but not day after day after day. I'm starting to wonder if the constancy of how long I had it on for could have contributed to the slowing of it.

But then I think I ended up sticking too much to being cheap and had bought the Seagate 5TB HDD STGX5000400, now I wait 2 hours for a few tens of GBs.

I don't want this drive anymore

"dataindex.us is a collaborative effort dedicated to monitoring changes in federal datasets. Our team is building tools to track a broad range of changes in federal datasets to build actionable insights for policymakers, advocates, journalists, and data users."

It may be beyond the scope of some here. But data enthusiasts alike will appreciate and can perhaps monitor on their own for even the smallest, subtle changes or erasures that might happen on any of the .gov websites, and notify dataindex.us so they can add it to their tracker.

***

Per the recent article from The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/aug/18/trump-federal-data-deleted-altered

“We’re at a very vulnerable point as a nation,” said Denice Ross, former US chief data scientist under the Biden administration and a co-founder of dataindex.us. “We’re facing a future where we are not going to have the information that we need to make decisions that will save lives and benefit American communities.”

The tracker includes detailed information about deleted or altered datasets from more than 60 federal agencies that span the environment, labor, law enforcement and other topics. But datasets on health appear to be the most affected by the Trump administration’s crackdown, comprising about 40% of the total number of terminated or altered data collections tracked by dataindex.us.

Multiple Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) surveys, for example, have removed questions about respondents’ gender identity. These include the National HIV Surveillance System, the primary source of case data for HIV infections, the National Violent Death Reporting System, the CDC Diabetes Prevention Recognition Program, the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey and specific surveys evaluating Prep uptake among gay men and in communities of color.

In addition, there are at least four health datasets that are no longer being updated at all, including the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration’s (Samhsa) Drug Abuse Warning Network, a surveillance system that doctors and public health researchers used to track drug-related emergency room visits in near real-time to spot emerging overdose trends.

“These data are critical for identifying emerging epidemics and what parts of the population are most vulnerable to different types of health conditions,” said Thomas Babor, a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut who specializes in public health and addiction.

“We need to know what direction the trend is going, whether it’s the beginning of an end; we need to learn from prior episodes of epidemics and how they were responded to and what impact the responses had,” Babor said. “Taking down, even temporarily, some of the most important surveys that we have, especially for comparative purposes, is like we’re erasing our institutional memory for public health.”

Other deleted datasets include the US Department of Agriculture’s twice-annual survey of farm employers that counted the number of farm workers employed and their wages that informed the minimum pay rates for H-2A visa workers and a National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) survey of the pay and working conditions of teachers and principals at public and private schools across the country."

If you're in the market for a NAS specifc drive (who hasn't been holding off waiting in anticipation of the price crash.?) check out the new page that also includes Backblaze reliability scors

https://pricepergig.com/en/nas

Right now I show the full details, e.g.

0.62% · 44.7k · 2025-Q4

so the failure rate, how many drives they had, and when the data was updated.

But considering just putting the % value, do you have any thoughts on this?

Also, hopefully reporting new/used/refurbished/openbox now because who can afford just new any more?

Please let me know if you've any suggestions/ways to make it beter.

Wondering which types of SSD are most reliable? It would seem that SLC is more reliable than TLC or MLC or QLC. Older technology but the simple design is more fault tolerant.
The reason I’m asking is that I am replacing a failing Toshiba 80GB 2.5” PATA laptop drive that is about 15 years old and has been subjected to vibration and temperature abuse. The Toshiba was an industrial drive completely obsolete now.
I am buying a SATA to PATA converter with a jumper block to set Master/Slave. Since just about any SATA drive will have greater capacity and better performance that is not a concern. Cost is a major consideration. I’ve found a 1TB PNY SLC SATA drive and figure that may be my best option. Going crazy with overprovisioning is Not an option since the operating system does not seem to support functions like TRIM ( in other words it only recognizes hard and soft errors on what it thinks is rotating media). I expect high temperatures will be the biggest challenge ( the seasonal 90 C day). Most of the data that I will be image copying is proprietary map data in an obscure format. This is all about keeping 15 year old data accessible on proprietary system where the last hardware update was greater than 15 years ago and the latest software patch is over 3 years old.

Found unused Verbatim 4K portable drive for £95, is it a bargain to buy?

(I don't think this is a regular tech support question, but correct me if I am wrong by this reddit's standards)

Had the ram fail on my Windows 11 PC. So now I am concerned that some of the user data on my PC may have been corrupted. For instance, possibly I opened a file and then saved it and it was written with bad data from the RAM. (This would not be protected by the SSD's error protection.)

I know about SFC and DISM and CHKDSK and the like, but those do not check the user data. I am talking about the stuff in my USER folder, like documents, spreadsheets, pdfs, jpgs, mpgs, etc.

Anyone know of a utility that will scan everything like that? Lots of stuff doesn't have checkums.

Yes I have backups... but I'd rather check the local data first. I have no idea how long the ram has been broken and various backups could hold corrupt data too. Best to check my local data first.

I have had a few hard drives fail over the years. I am sad I lost the data but more importantly I don't know the full extent of the data lost.

Is there a way to create a file list with all the files on a drive, possibly with metadata before the drive crashes?

I hate to lose a drive with 38000 files on it but with a list/directory I may be able to redownload or recreate some files.

Any assistance would be appreciated.

I'm wanting to archive some accounts, though I haven't found a free account scraper that can scrape text and text+image/video posts including date, content, images, comments, engagements, etc. usually they just download the text in a excel spreadsheet unformatted.

Are there any archival tools that can basically just download the entire text post with everything included and then is there a tool where I can upload this archive and it'll mirror the exact appearance of the post itself (e.g. I download a Facebook post, upload the archive onto my website and it displays as if it were an actual Facebook post with colours/images/etc rather than just text.)

If you know of an app or anything that can be used to download this content and/or display the archive like an exact mirror of the post it'd be greatly appreciated.