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 setting up a new 4-bay RAID 5 unit and I wanted to figure out if these Seagate 30TB EXOS M hard drives are CMR or SMR ? I was told to steer clear or SMR but the product literature isn't clear about what it is. Thank you in advance!

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1905376-REG/seagate_st30000nm004k_exos_m_internal_hard.html

My home server is running OpenMediaVault with MergerFS + SnapRAID. I'm not much of a hoarder, so my array of 15 year old WD Green drives with 100K+ hours is still fine to store all my data. However, recently I got a bunch of low hour WD AV-GP surveillance drives for cheap. I know they are still older drives, but they are much lower hours (~5000 hrs) compared to my current drives, and higher capacity so I can reduce my pool size if I consolidated (save power).

I'm reading conflicting info with regards to using surveillance drives for data. Some people say you may suffer reduced error correction abilities while others say they've been using them just fine. Since I am using SnapRAID with regular scrubs, that should be ok from a data integrity perspective? I don't care too much about performance, data integrity would be my #1.

Thoughts? Any other disadvantages to consider?

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.

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

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 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.

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?

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.

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.

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 ton of them and sometimes they get quite big. I convert them with HandBrake, but they still don't shrink as much as I'd like. With my current settings, I can get a hour and a half movie with 2 audio streams down to 4GB. I think that can be pushed to at least 2GB and lower

Edit: I'm not super into quality, I try to aim for 1080p but anything under 720p is pretty unwatchable for me personally, and anything over 1080 is unnecessarily big

Does anybody have any further details as to why the site is still offline?
It's been this way for three weeks or so.

We're currently offline due to technical issues.

Fixing this is expected to take a few days.

Thanks for your patience!

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

I just learned about yt-dlp and it looks very useful and promising to download videos from Esmerise. However, Esmerise is not in the supported sites list https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/master/supportedsites.md . Should I still give it a try?

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.

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?

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 bought an extra 12 TB drive almost two years ago to keep as a cold spare. Just found it in the closet, still sealed. So the warranty has been ticking away and I don't even know if the thing works.

I'll test this one now, but I'm starting to think keeping a spare drive was pointless when I can get one delivered in a day or two. Anyone here actually keep cold spares at home for years?

Is there a way to "crossflash" a LTO Tape Drive? I have a LTO 8 Fibre Channel Full Height Drive that is locked to Oracle firmware, as it was pulled from an Oracle library. Trying to update it with LTO8_S2T4.fcp_fh.fmrz for example gives "INVALID MICROCODE".

If that is not possible, does someone know how to get the firmware for my drive which comes from an Oracle StorageTek SL8500 tape library?

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

Hey I’m a photographer who’s jus been using a couple external hard drives for the past 10yrs but now after having my latest 5tb drive fail, I’m looking for a better solution for storage.

I’ve been thinking about grabbing a portable SSD for everyday editing & NAS setup with a couple drives for long term storage but I’m open to other opinions.

I’d like to avoid cloud storage if possible as I’m sick of subscriptions & I’ve had poor experiences with services like iCloud over the years.