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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • sudo smartctl -a /dev/yourssd

    You’re looking for the Media_Wearout_Indicator which is a percentage starting at 100% and going to 0%, with 0% being no more spare sectors available and thus “failed”. A very important note here, though, is that a 0% drive isn’t going to always result in data loss.

    Unless you have the shittiest SSD I’ve ever heard of or seen, it’ll almost certainly just go read-only and all your data will be there, you just won’t be able to write more data to the drive.

    Also you’ll probably be interested in the Total_LBAs_Written variable, which is (usually) going to be converted to gigabytes and will tell you how much data has been written to the drive.


  • As a FunFact™, you’re more likely to have the SSD controller die than the flash wear out at this point.

    Even really cheap SSDs will do hundreds and hundreds of TB written these days, and on a normal consumer workload we’re talking years and years and years and years of expected lifespan.

    Even the cheap SSDs in my home server have been fine: they’re pushing 5 years on this specific build, and about 200 TBW on the drives and they’re still claiming 90% life left.

    At that rate, I’ll be dead well before those drives fail, lol.



  • Maybe?

    It depends on if the added functions are software-based, or if there’s some hardware funkery going on.

    Given it’s a consumer product, I’d wager it’s just a drive in an enclosure that does all their mirroring/backups/encryption stuff in software, but their marketing material doesn’t seem to say one way or the other.

    Google indicates older versions can be reformatted, so I’d bet that’s still true.

    If I’m wrong it’s not my fault, etc.




  • I’m shocked I didn’t get downvoted to shit myself.

    It’s just that it was VERY clearly either sanctions or a NSL, since the Linux Foundation is in the US and the two things that result in a public entity like that making silent, un-explained changes are, well, sanctions and NSLs and you don’t say shit because your lawyer told you not to.

    I don’t necessarily agree that tossing contributors off an open-source project is in the spirit of the OFAC list, but the problem almost certainly is that they’re employed by some giant tech company in Russia.

    And, in Russia, like in the US, and Israel, and China, and anywhere else you care to mention, tech companies are almost always involved in military supply chains, since shit don’t work without computers at this point.

    Which leads to a cycle of being unable to work with Weapons, Inc. and someone works for Weapons, Inc. so now that person can’t be worked with either and so your choices are… comply with the OFAC list, or take a stupid amount of legal risk up to and including angry people with guns showing up to talk to you.

    We really don’t know the whole story and immediately jumping to “Imperialists bad!” is how certain chunks of Lemmy roll these days.

    I think they’d be much happier if they all moved to North Korea and helped achieve the goal of Juche by becoming dirt farmers.






  • competition in the x86 OS space back then

    Oh yeah: there were a stuuuupid amount of OSes.

    On the DOS side you had MS, IBM, and Digital Research.

    You also had a bunch of commercial UNIXes: NextStep, Solaris, Xenix/SCO, etc. along with Linux and a variety of BSDs. There were also a ton of Sys4/5 implementations that were single-vendor specific so they could sell their hardware (which was x86 and not something more exotic) that have vanished to time because that business model only worked for a couple of years, if that.

    There was of course two different Windows (NT, 9x), OS/2 which of course could also run (some) Windows apps, and a whole host of oddballs like QNX and BeOS and Plan9 or even CP/M86.

    It was a lot less of a stodgy Linux-or-Windows monoculture, and I miss it.


  • Seconding that’s a not-how-things-were.

    The lovely thing with legacy architectures (6502, 68k, x86, z80, etc.) that were in use during that time is that they were very very simple: all you needed to do was put executable code on a ROM at the correct memory address, and the system would boot it.

    There wasn’t anything required other than making sure the code was where the CPU would go looking for it, and then it’d handle it from there.

    Sure, booting an OS meant that you needed whatever booted the CPU to then chain into the OS bootloader and provide all the things the OS was expecting (BIOS functions, etc.) but the actual bootstrap from ‘off’ to ‘running code’ was literally just an EPROM burner away.

    It’s a lot more complicated now, but users would, for the most part, not tolerate removing the ability to boot any OS they feel like, so there’s enough pressure that locked shit won’t migrate down to all consumer hardware.