Use SSDs.

It's not hard. They've been around for a while, small ones are cheap now and are more than enough for at least 90% of developers. The rest can probably afford 2TB NVMe.

Why waste 60$ on a worthless 500GB HDD that will load the OS in the time that's enough for you to make scrambled eggs?
Instead, use 60$ on a 128GB SSD. Sure, it's smaller, but if speed is important for you, you can forget a bit about saving all of the porn you see online, or about installing every free game from Steam.

SSDs are cheap already. And the performance advantage they give is ENORMOUS. You can have a core i9, 64GB of fastest RAM bla bla bla, but if you don't have an SSD, a Celeron with an SSD will seem faster.

Get one, and NEVER again cry about long loading times of IDEs, unless you feel like 30 seconds for the longest load time is too much. If your time is THAT valuable, then you can afford NVMe SSDs in RAID 10 (which can be done easily in software with btrfs if you're on Linux).

Seriously!
Every day I see posts like "Visual Studio is crap because it installs for 6 hours", or "Android studio starts in 30 minutes", or "Visual Studio Code sucks because it loads for too long compared to vim".
It's as if you only have access to budget 10 year old computers.

TLDR; My 2TB HDD got wiped in one fell swoop by a 9-year old child.

You know... I've never been too great about keeping backups. Even to this day, I only keep one or two local backups and nothing on the "cloud".

So this was about 5 years ago. At the time, I was living together with my girlfriend - who would later become my wife. She had a son from a previous relationship, who at the time was 9 years old.

I had a small desk in the living room of our one-bedroom apartment, that I used for my computer, which has been a laptop for a long time now. One unfortunate thing about the layout of the apartment was that the wall plug near my desk was attached to a light switch.

I had a 2TB external hard drive - with its own power cable - plugged into my laptop. Then, things started to move in slow motion... The GF's son comes inside from playing, my GF asks him to turn off the light. He reaches over, and shuts off power to my laptop - and the external hard drive.

He must have hit that switch at JUST the right fucking time. The laptop ran on battery, no big deal. The hard drive, when I powered it back up - was wiped clean. I tried data recovery on it, but the HDD was encrypted, which makes things more complicated.

Needless to say, I was not happy. I never got that data back, but I did learn not to expose my hard drives to 9 year olds. Very dangerous little creatures.

You want to know the best part? He destroyed another hard drive of mine, a few years later. Should I tell that story?

I know it is 1 week too late but i dont care. Im aware that my workbench looks like shit but in reality it is a "creative mess"

@Condor Do you envy me now? I have 1054z that is hacked and has all its features unlocked! I have desoldering station and crappy (very crappy) soldering station. In addition to that i got simple sine/square generator that goes to 1Mhz (old communist poland tech - indestructible and great)

Situation with my pc is complicated. My main pc (with the curved monitor)
-i5 3350p
-12 Gb or ram (2*4Gb and another 4 that friend gave me)
-radeon 7800hd (*RIP* cant play games anymore 😥)
-256Gb sata SSD
-2Tb WD blue HDD

In addition to that i have a laptop
i5 4 cores, 8Gb ram, 1Tb HDD, GTX1050

I use my lap for gaming now, i even connected that monitor as main lap.
(double monitors yay!) sometimes i use my old pc for minor things but i use rdp for that, it is great experience! (my lap displaying rdp from my old pc on second monitor that was my old pcs main one 😂 i find it a tiny bit funny)

18pm: *starting to work on own project. Listening to classical music for better concentration*
22pm: *no progress*
22:10pm: *putting on some good old death core on max volume coz fuck it.*
22:30pm: *realizing I did more in the past 20mins than in the 4h before*
22:45pm: *super motivated*
2am: *same song again? Quick look on the clock...* "fuuuuuu" *apparently listened to my whole playlist. OK. Let's search for more stuff on my 2TB HDD I dedicated to death core etc*
4am: "lul" *go to sleep*
6am: *wake up, go to school"
*goto 18pm*

hey ranteros! i like to dream and i know many of us dream of a nice machine to do anything on it, if you want to post the specs of your ideal build(s) (even a laptop, pre-built pc, space gray macbook pro... doesn't matter). and your current one.

here's mine:

ideal: {
type: desktop-pc,
cpu: intel i7-8700K (coffee lake),
gpu: nvidia geforce gtx 1080ti,
ram: 32gb ddr4,
storage: {
ssd: samsung 960 evo 500gb,
hdd: 2tb wd black
},
motherboard: any good motherboard that supports coffee lake and has a good selection of i/o,
psu: anything juicy enough, silver rated,
cooling: i don't care about liquid cooling that much, or maybe i'm just afraid of it,
case: i accept any form factor, as long as it's not too oBNoxi0Us,
peripherals: {
monitor: 1080p, maybe 1440p, i can't 4k because of the media i consume (i have tons of shit i watch in 720p) + other reasons,
keyboardmousecombo: i like logitech stuff, nothing fancy, their non mechanical keyboards are nice, for mice the mx master 2 is nice i think, i also don't care about rgb because i think it's too distracting and i'm always in darkness so some white backlight is great
},
os: windows 10, tails (i have some questions about tails i'll be asking in a different post,
}

i think this is enough for ideal, now reality:

current: {
type: laptop,
brand: acer (aspire 7736z),
cpu: pentium dual-core 2.10ghz,
gpu: geforce g210m 2gb (with cuda™!),
ram: 4gb ddr3,
storage: hdd 500gb wd blue 5400rpm (this motherfucker stood the test of time because it's still working since i bought this thing (the laptop as it is) used in late 2009 although it's full of bad sectors and might anytime, don't worry i have everything backed up, i have a total of 5 hdds varying from 320gb to 1tb with different stuff on them),
screen: 17 inch hd-ready!!! (i think it's a tn panel), i've never done a test on color accuracy, but to my eyes it's bright, colorful, and has some dust particles between the lcd and backlight hah,
other cool things: dvd player/burner, full-sized keyboard with numeric keypad, vga, hdmi, 4 usb ports, ethernet, wi-fi haha, and it's hot, i mean so hot, hotter than elsa jean and piper perri combined,
os: windows 10, tails
}

if you read this whole thing i love you, and if you have some time to spare on a sunday you can share your dream rig and the sometimes cruel current one if you dare. you don't have to share them both. i know many will go b.o.b and say "what you're hoping to accomplish, i already did bitch.", that's cool as well, brag about your cool rig!

TL;DR - (almost) childhood trauma due to Wesrern Digital crap products lead to lot of data loss and a plege to not trust or purchase their products for the rest of my life.

....

So, I got my first ever Wester Digital 2TB Mybook, back when 2TB was a really big thing. While in the midst of moving (not copying) a LOT of data to it, the damn disk just.. died. There was no fall, no power outage, no damage, it just stopped working. I was out of words and out of options. Tried yanking out the disk and connecting it directly to a system, but no luck because it looks like it's the HDD mobo that died.

Also stupid young me did not realise back then that, even if a "moved" the data, the original data is still most likely in their original location, and so, never bothered a recovery.

Lots of good stuff lost that day.

And as with a lot of you, my disaster recovery system kicked up 10 fold. Now I got redundant local and cloud backup copies of all critical and otherwise unattainable data.

As you may have guessed, I never bought another Wester Digital product ever again. My internal HDDs are Segate, and external is a suprisingly long lived Toshiba Canvio.

Found on my 2TB HDD
Lets try restore it all

Got my new 2TB HDD delivered today a few days early (expected on Monday). Time for some data migration and that new OS smell!

I think my upgrade strategy will be a Ship of Theseus story in the end.

Why the fuck is Seagate's official bootable HDD/SSD toolkit 32-bit??? It's bad enough that it's TinyCore, but it's 32-bit, so even while booting it tells you to fuck off if a drive has >2TB worth of LBAs, but it's meant for ALL their drives! Their Twitter support was predictably useless, too, and was just "we don't support running the bootable disc off of anything larger than 32GB" and "we don't officially support Linux formatted disks in our tools" (neither of which were even remotely close. The first one I can understand, it was an untrained knee-jerk reaction to a number they recognize, but the other one...)

Turns out the PS3's HDD stores a copy of the NAND/NOR by default and they use what i'll deem "confuser FAT" (in both FAT16 and FAT32 flavors) as partitions as they're FAT* partitions with nonsensical/zeroed header bits, which make tools cry ("the first FAT32 partition says the drive has 354 heads, the second partition says 0 and the drive says it has 2...?" "The drive is 320GB, so why in the hell is the partition table reporting a sensical size but the FAT has an entry 2TB thataways?" "This FAT16 filesystem has filenames stored as 16.2 instead of 8.3 natively???")

christmas wishlist????? dont give me some of those cute crap, what i really need:
- my other breadboard
- 2TB HDD!!! pls i need to degoogle my life
- wirerap cables
- a new laptop with gr8 specs, good for both programming and gaming pls
- a big whiteboard for my overflowing ideas

id rather have something useful than the usual stuff people give as gifts xd

I am thinking about building new PC, so I made a list of components. What do you think? Any suggestions?
I don't know which GPU model/brand to get yet. Would like to play at 1440p >60Hz so GTX1070 is not enough if I don't wanna buy new GPU in a few years (probably 4-5 years as I always do).

- CPU: AMD RYZEN 7 2700X
- GPU: GTX 1080 Ti / GTX 1080
- HDD: WD Gold 2TB
- SSD: Samsung 860 EVO 250 GB
- RAM: Patriot Viper RGB Series 16 GB KIT DDR4 3200 MHz CL16 DDR4 Black
- MB: ASUS ROG STRIX B450-F GAMING
- CAS: NZXT H500 Black
- PSU: Corsair HX750

Hey all

Much rather ask here than on a subreddit full of jerks

I have a PC running Ubuntu 20.04LTS that I use as a media server.

8GB RAM
i3 6100
1TB Samsung HDD (Boot)
3TB Seagate Barracuda
2TB WD Blue

The 2TB and 3TB are NTFS drives. I formatted them that way because they are network shared to Windows machines. Often when watching videos off those drives, they kinda just stick for a second here and there. You know, like how a scratched DVD would.

This happens regardless of if I watching directly on the server or over the network on another PC or my TV

I tried copying a video over onto the boot drive and then it worked fine.

The 3TB has one bad sector and the 2TB is reportedly perfectly healthy. So any ideas?

Could it be as simple as bad sata or power connectors?

Speeds seem fine when copying to and from though

Background: Got a macbook, A external HDD(2TB) of which +- 1TB was used.

Yesterday i moved all my personal projects from my work laptop to my external, to move to my macbook.
One of my clients(Freelancing) calls asking me to install new hardware, install software and fix OS(Windows 8.1).
I leave work and go directly to said client and he hands over his Lenovo S20 Touch(No CD/DVD Drive).
I install windows 10 and other software from my flash(Already on there)

Good, Everything is ready to go. I go home and finally get to sit down with my baby(MacBook)

Me: *Plugs in external*
...
nothing.
Opens Finder, can't find flashdrive
Check MacKeeper
MacKeeper: VirusDetected
Me: *Pissed*

Client calls.
Client: Hey is everything ok with the laptop, no viruses no nothing. Because everytime i insert a flashdrive it gets a virus and i have to buy a new one.

Me: I installed windows 10 on it, it should be fine with defender now.

Heart: *shattered* YOU COULD'VE TOLD ME THAT BEFORE FUCKER!!

i never knew people like this still exist