i bought a few smr drives, knowing they were smr. they were cheaper, a lot cheaper than the same amount of space in cmr. used only for static media storage, so that’s not a big deal, really., but holy hell was it slow getting stuff on them initially.
i have a few self-powered externals that are also smr (quite common with those as they use 2.5in notebook hdd). when those things have to start shuffling bits around and rewriting tracks, sustained write speeds fall well under what even usb2 can send.
i bought a big external hdd recently on impulse… a clearance sale. it was really, really cheap. with the thinking that i could ‘shuck’ it because i’m short on space in a couple storage systems. i checked. i can, but i haven’t. hell, i haven’t even used it yet other than to run a full smart diag on it, followed by a full format and a read/write verify. took days. then i put it back in the box and have basically forgotten about it until now.
you have to be careful on what models you buy. some have usb built onto the controller board (no internal sata) or other things (e.g. encryption chip, weird power) that make it more difficult or even impossible to use the internal drive in an environment other than the enclosure it ships in.
a pallet of 4th gens? i have a dozen left here from around that era that i can’t get rid of without literally giving them away. they’re ‘tolerable’ for a gui linux or win10 with an ssd, but the ‘performance per watt’ just isn’t there with hardware this old. i used a few of them (none in an always-on role, though), but the rest just sit in the corner, without home nor purpose.
these 800 g1s are, iirc, 12vo, so upgrade or reuse potential is a bit limited. most users would want windows, and win10 does run ‘ok enough’ on 4th gen, just make sure they’re booting from ssd (120gb minimum). but they’ll run into that arbitrarily-errected wall-of-obsolescence with trying to upgrade or install win11 when win10 retires in ~ 18 months (you can ‘rufus’ a win11 installer, but there’s no guarantee that you will be able to in the future). that limits demand and resale value of pretty much all the pre-8th gen hardware.
i personally bought them. no i don’t have money. didn’t then either. they were about $200 each, just prior to when vista started shipping (they were on sale). ram was upgraded from scrap, so was one of the video cards and one of the cpu (they were both originally windsors)–the other was bought new for ~$50 in late 2008 or so.
when i wanted bandwidth available ‘elsewhere’ (such as streaming or games on a different pc) but wanted to continue long transfers, used to neuter the lan adapter configuration on the system doing the transfers by setting it to 10baseT, full or half duplex for 10 or 5mbit max. that was back when my isp connection topped out at < 15mbit. i didn’t always use a program or an addon that had rate limiting, and that was my ‘solution’.
it’s been a few months since i’ve had that pc booted-up, but i think this is the one:
https://www.videohelp.com/software/Subtitle-Workshop
note that i don’t create or translate subs, all i really use it for is for adjusting timing of the whole file (using vlc to find the + or -), and the occasional edit or delete of an existing line.
but no refunds past 30 days into a longer-than-one-month term. pay by the year, cancel 6 months in, you’re out half of what you paid. not even converting the ‘used’ time into a shorter appropriate length term (like a six month plan or 2 quarterly ones…) and refunding some if it…
it’s robbery.
cable companies in the u.s. do the same shit, now. no prorated refunds–even on normal monthly billing.
i’ve watched more than a few shows that have been brutally hacked into wide format from the original 4:3. the practice is horrible. they need to stop pulling that shit and let the viewer decide whether to crop the frame or not–or put a proper pan & scan up instead of a blind hack job and leave the original format available, too.
you can verify warranty on wd’s site.
warranty exchanged drives should carry a minimal warranty or the balance of the original drive’s warranty–whichever is longer.
but it was ‘doa’–get a refund from seller, or via ebay’s/paypal’s buyer protection. don’t mess around with mfg warranty, you don’t need to here.
low-bandwidth data plans in bulk are pretty cheap. it’s what many atms, vending machines, redbox and similar, etc., along with sensors and gauges, and what-not for a variety of applications, use.
over the expected lifespan of a car, it would cost the manufactures less than they charge for a set of floor mats.
when we’ve had netflix (off and on a couple months at a time, last was about a year and a half ago), we often encountered 540p max playback on “hd” titles that should have (legitimately) been streaming at 1080p; and we rarely were able to use all the simultaneous connections of the plan (usually only limit-1)
users can modify their useragent string, and sometimes they have to because some webdevs are morons.
some browsers actually default to using chrome instead of its own.
using a browser-reported useragent string to count marketshare itself is flawed from the start, using a very narrow and limited scope of web sites to measure it–even more so.
if i counted my own clients: home, soho and small business end users… it’s about even between chrome and firefox on windows (chrome users doing so on their own, as we highly recommend firefox, and vivaldi over chrome for a chromium-based solution) with edge trailing far behind; and about 3 to 1 android (chrome) over safari on mobile with (so far, but soon to change) very few mobile firefox users.
ad-skip to present day. encryption and drm is being introduced into the new atsc 3.0 broadcast standard, and some stations are already using it.