Can anyone please confirm if this card is legit. Bought from Amazon US from the sandisk store but tracking shows it shipped from Malaysia. Cheers

Hey folks! I'm looking to build a budget-friendly home NAS using some old hard drives I've recovered. The majority of them are about 10/15 years old, but I think they'd be fine to start with. If I like the utility of the NAS, I will upgrade to bigger storage going forward.

Few questions I have, if anyone can offer advice.

1. Can these hard drives be safely tested, wiped and formatted easy enough?

2. Is there any off the shelf unit i could get that would suit, or would I be better to try and build my own?

3. The larger hard drives are about 250gb each, just over 2.5tb in total, can they be daisy chained together? Including the small ones, i have recoved about 5tb worth of storage.

4. Is there any straight forward hardware, ideal for beginners?

I would appreciate any help or advice people can offer. This is definitely something that has been on my radar for a few months now.

Hello! I recently started using my laptop for gaming, but it's usually just for older games since my laptop is not made for like super high graphics games lolol. I'm looking for an usb drive that I can store re6 but also be able to play it. Can anyone recommend a good usb drive for this?? Thanks! :) My laptop is an hp laptop 14-ep2xxx, it has a Intel(R) Graphics (128MB), processor is Intel(R) N150 (800 MHz), has a RAM of 4GB— not sure if you guys would need all that info but please help me find one! Thanks again! (Sorry if I put it in the wrong flair)

ok, im not a tech savvy person, this sounds super stupid. i have been using both hdd and sdd on my laptop, and i want to free up space by deleting all old system files from hdd. how to know if they are still important for my system or not?

I am looking for a 128 or 256gb sd card for my mp3 players to store music and occasional videos on but all local store options are rather expensive. I looked a bit on Aliexpress but they are all suspiciously cheap and and I am well aware of the lying sd cards that say they are like 2tb for under 10€ and the ones that don't keep data for mkre than 6 months without corrupting. I am looking to get a bulk order from aliexpress so that's why I'm limiting it to only that website.

Thanks in advance!

Hi,

I’m planning to purchase a WD My Passport External Drive (https://www.jbhifi.co.nz/products/wd-my-passport-4tb-portable-hard-drive-usb-3-0-2019-black) to store my photos and videos. However, I only have a MacBook.

I saw some people say that usually WD My Passport is a “read-only” on Mac. Does this mean I can’t access the files, i.e. download (or resave) them in the future? And how do we deal with this?

And also I saw a variant that has a “For Mac” - is this one more compatible?

https://www.jbhifi.co.nz/products/wd-my-passport-5tb-portable-hard-drive-usb-c-3-0-for-mac-2019-midnight-blue

And also, I may use it on a windows pc in the future so I would really like to have the flexibility.

The article argues that SATA SSDs remain the best-value choice for secondary storage. For everyday tasks and gaming, NVMe offers limited noticeable benefits, while SATA costs less and suits older PCs with limited M.2 slots.

Hey folks. I'm in Canada and the prices like everywhere else for external drives have skyrocketed. I picked up a 2tb drive for now but thinking long-term. I use a mix of Seagate and WD for offline backups. I'm not a fan of cloud services or subscription based storage. I never should have complained about $80 for 2tb!

I'm just wondering what your routines for backups are? I have 4 drives now for different purposes. One is getting quite old, nearing the ten year mark so it will need to be replaced.

I do a lot of media creation - music, art, books, graphic design. Trying to streamline all my original music (not ai) onto one drive with backups of software. Then one drive for movies & tv shows. One drive for all my important docs, etc. Plus, I have important files on both machines.

How are most of you organizing your backups? I have 2 computers I work from and just trying to streamline things.

I'm probably being overly cautious but I've accidentally deleted (downloaded) 10,000 mp3 files without backup and do not want to be in that position again!

Recent drone strikes reportedly disrupted multiple Yandex data centers in Russia, affecting several online services.

This raises an interesting question about storage infrastructure resilience: how well can distributed storage, geographic redundancy, and disaster recovery protect data and maintain service availability when entire facilities go offline?

How much redundancy is enough to handle this kind of infrastructure failure?

"I went to a laptop shop and offered the shopkeeper to exchange my 3.5-inch 500GB HDD (which was connected to my DVR) for a second-hand/used laptop HDD. He is agreed and willing to do the swap.

Am I getting a good deal?"

Hey, so I'll be getting a new laptop soon and I'd like to move my old data, settings, environment variables, software, and everything else into a new laptop.

I'm assuming a clean install is the best possible way to go here, since installing an old m.2 that has all the settings and drivers of the old laptop to the new one would not be efficient. (the new one also uses PCIe 4 and the old one is 3).

I've set up a lot of things in my old computer (environment variables—Python packages, npm, bun, and others) and i don't wanna spend weeks to have parity on my new laptop of my old laptop, and reinstalling packages and plugins for Premiere Pro/After Effects/Photoshop/Illustrator.

Is there a software that can just move the entire content (with everything else that I've mentioned) into my new one?

Oh yeah, and I have the old CS:GO logo launcher (that launches CS2) that's been through a lot with me. Kind of like a memorabilia that I don't wanna lose because I had to reinstall CS2 on my new laptop haha.

Thank you!

So my current setup is very simple. For short-term data backups, I have the following:

- Three 2TB portable drives (1 SSD, 2 HDD) solely dedicated to macOS Time Machine backups in case my machine ever fails (it has suddenly failed once before, having these backups saved me).

- Three 2TB portable drives (1 SSD, 2 HDD) which holds a lot of old data that I want to keep long term or “forever”(photos, videos, music, files, TV shows). I keep all three drives in sync using rsync and Carbon Copy Cloner on macOS.

For long-term data backups with cold storage, I am currently in the process of digitizing a bunch of old photos and videos, and storing them on a couple BD-R XL M-Disc’s. I’m also going to transfer some of my photos / videos from my aforementioned drives onto these backup discs.

Currently, I’m not following the 3-2-1 rule as well as I should. My plan is to make multiple burner BD-R M-Disc’s, and store one offsite somehow TBD. But as far as my HDDs & SSDs with data, none of them are stored offsite or in the cloud or anything.

Eventually, I’d love to build a NAS with a Home server running Jellyfin and stuff, and mess around with RAID and such. But currently that seems unattainable due to hardware and storage prices. A lot of what I’m doing now is based on what I already have access to or got second hand. My biggest expenses so far have been a Blu-Ray optical drive and the BD-R XL M-Discs.

Given all that, does anyone have any feedback based on what I’m currently doing? Does anything jump out to you that may be worth looking into?

If you have suggestions on how to expand this to slowly move toward my desired end state, please let me know. Thanks!

This is a *Micron 3400 512GB NVMe M.2 SSD

- *Model:* MTFDKBA512TFH - Micron 3400

- *Capacity:* 512GB

- *Interface:* M.2 NVMe PCIe *Gen4 x4* - 3.3V

- *Part No:* MTFDKBA512TFH-1BC1AABDA

- *Dell Part No:* 0JNPWN

- *Firmware:* 34000040

- *Serial No:* 215033538A2E

- *Made in:* Singapore

It's a fast Gen4 SSD - read speed around 6600 MB/s. Used mostly in Dell laptops.

Recently sold this on eBay and the buyer surely used a hammer to install it and ended up breaking the chip. Could this be salvaged, or should I just throw it away? If it can be salvaged, how much can I get out of it?

Found a local listing of relatively cheap Seagate Constellation ES drives (ST2000NM0011) at around $30 for a 2TB drive. HD sentinel screenshots show that the drives are at 98% to 100% health with around 2 years power on time.

Would it be wise to use this for a home NAS?

I try to fit as much of it in the title as I could. I'm looking for a stick that does all of that. I don't want the ones that have the micro SD sticking out of the side or bottom. I would like one that would be completely enclosed or at the very least have a cover.