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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2025

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  • Containers lower the bar since the developer doesn’t need to make their program work on every system - just the container’s system.

    Price we pay for more programs. And they bring boons like read-only, rootless, limited capabilities, and constrained perf limits (esp if you use Podman with Quadlets).

    And don’t feel trapped - the Dockerfile is a recipe to build that program. Probably want to do it in an LXC container since it’ll want to use /data for its data or something. But the LXC container can also be run as a user but the program thinks it’s root. Plenty of security abounds!

    I think it’s worth the price and you’re not trapped. They’re trapped with you and your robust Quadlet files



  • I just had some G Skillz DDR4 3200CL16 2x8GB go bad. Sticks had caused problems before. I lowered the clocks to 2133 and then it passed when I had instabilities before, but when they came back nothing changed it. Degredation I guess? Def odd for RAM, but maybe bad batch. Mine were made 2018 Sep.

    Do clean the contacts and reseat to be sure.

    But about a month ago I did the RMA form, had to email them to remind them to send me the info, got the RMA info, sent it in, and a week or so later they sent me back newly manufactured identical RAM sticks new in box.

    There’s absolutely no info when you send it in till when you get it back, but they did send the replacement. You will be without RAM for a bit. They did not want an invoice since its lifetime babyyy






  • Backup drive doesn’t need to be anything more than holding your (ideally daily) backup of your main drive(s). It doesn’t need to be powered up and spinning all the time, it can be in the same computer. Spinning up and down causes major wear on hard drives, but I think spinning up once a day for backups is fine and won’t stress it.

    For example, have 3 used enterprise drives in my computer case: 2 in BTRFS RAID1 (mirror) as a data drive and 1 with BTRFS as a backup drive. I use snapshotting to mirror the data drive to the backup drive. I then use restic to copy essential data from the backup drive to a remote cloud location (friend’s house with a 4th smaller hard drive - if I did not have a friend with a hard drive I would use hetzner most likely). My Linux ISO’s don’t go remote, but my photos do.

    Thus I have immediate redundancy (and bit rot protection) from the BTRFS RAID1 data drives, I have a local full backup with the BTRFS backup drive, and I have my essential stuff far away if the computer explodes or something.

    Edit: again, if I was going to save cash I would drop the RAID1 from the data drives and just get 1 data drive and 1 backup drive. RAID1 is never as good as an independent copy.



  • Consumer is fine then, cheapest you can. Edit: I did see people mention SMR drives, get cheapest CMR drives. SMR is not worth the money saved for usual use cases.

    You can def wait, but do the over-under with what you can pay. External drives, even if shucked, seem to be the lowest quality drives and die earliest. May be better to get real drives now, even with inflated costs.

    Make sure you get a drive for backup. Extra layout up front but worth it. I’d recc 1 data drive + 1 backup drive over just 2 raid1 data drives any day.


  • Now is a bad time to buy hard drives price-wise. Massive price gouging going on with all storage pre-sold based on IOUs to “AI” companies.

    If you must…

    Buy used enterprise drives with a ~5 year warranty. In US there is serverpartdeals and goharddrives. I am not sure of the Europe equivalents but I am sure they exist. The enterprise drives should be cheaper than new drives and will last longer; they’ve been used out of their early failure bathtub curve but they’re young enough to be given a 5 year warranty. Make sure to get ones with SATA connectors not SAS, you’ll need a PCIe card to talk to the SAS ones, and maybe something for power idk.

    They should be cheaper - I am not sure if price uncertainty has upended that.

    Enterprise drives are louder, I have them in a quiet case with sound dampening padding (fractal define) and I do not hear them 5 feet away.

    I have heard bad things about consumer drives longevity. I used several 1 TB barracudas for years with no issues in a server setting, I used 3 TB barracudas in a server setting and one failed early. I used a 4 TB Toshiba that failed early and I used an 8 TB blue that is fine in a personal computing setting. I have bought enterprise drives and none have an issue yet.

    It seems luck of the draw, so the thing to maximize is cheapest per GB.